Re: the cold-boot attack - a paper tiger?

[Matthias Schniedermeyer <ms@xxxxxxx>]

On 08.06.2008 07:42, Phil wrote:
> This is just semantics:
> 
> "cold boot" to me means booting up from zero power
> ("cold") to powering on, which means going via a BIOS
> and full boot sequence, as opposed to pressing the
> reset button which maintains power ("warm boot").

I disagree.

I most cases the "soft boot" (IOW the "reboot"-command) is called "warm 
boot"(*), but the software can choose to warm or cold-boot depending on 
which method to reboot is chosen (Which i ad-hoc don't know, i only know 
there are several methods to accomplish a reboot in software).

If done right(*) IOW "warm" the BIOS can decide to skip part of the POST 
which results in bootstraping the OS a few seconds faster.

Wherease when you "cold boot"/hardware reset the POST is identical to 
the POST after switching on power.



*:
AFAIK, Linux doesn't do this intentionally. But YMMV.
At personally i haven't seen a Linux-System warm booting for years, or 
modern BIOSes don't skip parts of the POST anymore.


Bis denn

-- 
Real Programmers consider "what you see is what you get" to be just as 
bad a concept in Text Editors as it is in women. No, the Real Programmer
wants a "you asked for it, you got it" text editor -- complicated, 
cryptic, powerful, unforgiving, dangerous.


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