Princeton Univeristy has recently released information on how to defeat disk encryption technology such as BitLocker, FileVault, TrueCrypt and others using what is called ‘Cold Boot Attacks’. The entire paper, ”Lest We Remember: Cold Boot Attacks on Encryption Keys“ (PDF) is available online. 

There are major concerns about the possibilty of data getting compromised for those who are responsible for protecting sensitive data. Fortunately to successfully attack a machine using drive encryption, the attack has to occur within a set of ideal circumstances. These ideal attack circumstances can be emliminated by following specific guidlines to protect the device which is using hard drive encryption. The Microsoft Stay Safe Team has posted guidelines on how to protect BitLocker from Cold Boot Attacks. If you are running BitLocke, be sure to follow these guidlines to defend against this well known exploit.