Anyone with physical access. I think it is understandable from the phrase.
There is a common misconception about how lock-screens in general work - they usually just prevents using the current hardware and software as it is to access the current OS. But the disk encryption is the main thing that prevents modification and other kind of access to actual data. And if the disk encryption key is lying in the memory, then effectively, the disk encryption is bypassed if someone can access the machine physically and assuming that there are no sufficient tampering protections in place for that machine.
Anyone with physical access, significant tools, and experience. The FBI has people who can pull data out of memory after freezing the RAM but the average laptop thief doesn’t so how serious this is depends significantly on your threat model. If you’re not a major criminal, bitcoin whale, or intelligence target this is almost certainly academic.
While that is true, the fact is that encryption is technically useless for anyone who is not constantly powering off and on, which is surely a bunch of people. That this is not widely understood is IMO a problem. And excellent reason for Debian's feature.
> If you’re not a major criminal, bitcoin whale, or intelligence target this is almost certainly academic.
Thanks, that's what I thought.
> Anyone with physical access. I think it is understandable from the phrase.
Sorry, I'm probably dense, I still don't get it. You steal a laptop, you open it, the screen is locked with a password/fingerprint whatever. How do you read out the RAM from that laptop?
Several options. One is you restart and boot from a live system where you are root, and then dump all memory. This is described in the paper with the witty title "Lest We Remember: Cold Boot Attacks on Encryption Keys":
https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/sec08/tech/full_papers/h...
Other options: DMA attacks. Also you never know what the Intel Management Engine hidden in your computer is doing. It's running a version of Minix you don't have any control over, and it has full access to memory.
>How do you read out the RAM from that laptop?
the term to look up is "cold boot attack" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_boot_attack).
tons of cool live demonstrations of how it works on youtube if you've got the 20-40 minutes to spare
Still, this is a pretty crazy definition of "anyone".