Security
Although dynamic memory is only specified and guaranteed to retain its contents when supplied with power and refreshed every 64 ms, the memory cell capacitors often retain their values for significantly longer, particularly at low temperatures. Under some conditions most of the data in DRAM can be recovered even if it has not been refreshed for several minutes.
This property can be used to circumvent security and recover data stored in memory and assumed to be destroyed at power-down by quickly rebooting the computer and dumping the contents of the RAM, or by cooling the chips and transferring them to a different computer. Such an attack was demonstrated to circumvent popular disk encryption systems, such as the open source TrueCrypt, Microsoft's BitLocker Drive Encryption, and Apple's FileVault. This type of attack against a computer is often called a cold boot attack.
Read more about this topic: Dynamic Random-access Memory
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