Edinburgh Napier University

  The usage of encryption keys is an important aspect in preserving privacy in communications. Increasingly these communications are protected using SSL/TLS methods. Along with this, there is a general move towards using virtualised infrastructures for hosts and servers. A particular weakness is then with the running memory of a virtual machine, and whether this stores the encryption keys used in the communication. The work in this research has a number of novel contributions, including being the first to discover and crack Cha-Cha20 encryption keys and nonce values in running memory.