Firewire threat to FDE
Full-Disk Encryption (FDE) suffers class attacks lately.
As if the latest research (which showed that RAM contents can be recovered after power-down) was not enough, it seems as Firewire ports can form yet an easier attack vector into FDE-locked laptops.
From TechWorld: Windows hacked in seconds via Firewire
The attack takes advantage of the fact that Firewire can directly read and write to a system’s memory, adding extra speed to data transfer.
The tool mentioned seems to only bypass the Win32 unlock screen, but given the free access to RAM, exploit code that digs out FDE keys is a matter of very little extra work.
This is nothing new. The concept was presented a couple of years ago, but I haven’t seen most FDE enthusiasts disable their Firewire ports yet.