The bad side-effects of this memory technology: you can't just power-off your computer to hide your current activity; decrypted passwords in memory still will be readable after shutoff.
This is silly. Just because memory is non volatile storage doesn't mean the OS can't do reasonable things like clearing out some state as it goes to sleep.
Ok. So your computer is in lock-screen mode requiring you to enter a password before resuming your interactive session. Someone with physical access to your computer certainly can find a way to divorce the memory from the rest of the system without letting the OS do its thing ... your live program memory is compromised. This memory often will have more sensitive info than your (possibly encrypted) mass storage.
Firstly, the fabrication process everyone is excited about puts the memrister cells directly atop the cmos logic gates as just another layer to the die. No external memory bus to tap into. So you'd need the sort of equipment used to remove layers from dies to expose the cells for reverse engineering, testing, etc. If someone with these resources is after you, you're already fucked regardless of the exact technological vector.
Secondly, a system designer could trivially add some amount of volatile storage for holding security sensitive data. Various schemes of encrypted pages that are decrypted using a key stored in volatile SRM within the CMS could be used. In other words, we could do the same things we currently do with hard drives between the memrister array and SRAM that acts as a decrypted cache.
Thirdly, you're applying an expectation to all memristers that is not applied to existing storage technologies. It might be a fair criticism of a concrete product that operates in an insecure way, but it's absurd to apply this expectation to an entire technology.
This is already possible with existing DRAM memory; simply cool the RAM chips sufficiently and you increase data retention enough to extract the RAM sticks and read back the data. However, if someone has physical access to your PC, there is almost certainly an easier way for them to gain access to your data. The best protection is restricting physical access.
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The bad side-effects of this memory technology: you can't just power-off your computer to hide your current activity; decrypted passwords in memory still will be readable after shutoff.
This is silly. Just because memory is non volatile storage doesn't mean the OS can't do reasonable things like clearing out some state as it goes to sleep.
Ok. So your computer is in lock-screen mode requiring you to enter a password before resuming your interactive session. Someone with physical access to your computer certainly can find a way to divorce the memory from the rest of the system without letting the OS do its thing ... your live program memory is compromised. This memory often will have more sensitive info than your (possibly encrypted) mass storage.
I disagree.
Firstly, the fabrication process everyone is excited about puts the memrister cells directly atop the cmos logic gates as just another layer to the die. No external memory bus to tap into. So you'd need the sort of equipment used to remove layers from dies to expose the cells for reverse engineering, testing, etc. If someone with these resources is after you, you're already fucked regardless of the exact technological vector.
Secondly, a system designer could trivially add some amount of volatile storage for holding security sensitive data. Various schemes of encrypted pages that are decrypted using a key stored in volatile SRM within the CMS could be used. In other words, we could do the same things we currently do with hard drives between the memrister array and SRAM that acts as a decrypted cache.
Thirdly, you're applying an expectation to all memristers that is not applied to existing storage technologies. It might be a fair criticism of a concrete product that operates in an insecure way, but it's absurd to apply this expectation to an entire technology.
This is already possible with existing DRAM memory; simply cool the RAM chips sufficiently and you increase data retention enough to extract the RAM sticks and read back the data. However, if someone has physical access to your PC, there is almost certainly an easier way for them to gain access to your data. The best protection is restricting physical access.