You don’t have to be a computer genius to break data encryptions, a group of researchers from Princeton University, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Wind River Systems showed in a study revealed on Thursday. What you do need is a little imagination, and voila! - Instant access to encrypted data.

Data thefts have been anything but rare in the past few years, and they seemed to intensify and keep the pace with developers’ latest methods of encryption. Experts explained how that was possible: “DRAMs used in most modern computers retain their contents for seconds to minutes after power is lost, even at room temperature and even if removed from a motherboard.”

In other words: vulnerability at its best. This means that even if the computer has been shut down, the “content persists sufficiently for malicious (or forensic) acquisition of usable full-system memory images” and that “limits the ability of an operating system to protect cryptographic key material from an attacker with physical access,” the study says.

The experiment was simple: you don’t need sophisticated equipment to retrieve data from a memory chip, you just need a cooling device – in this case, a dust remover. The inverted cans of canned air have been discharged on the chips, which caused temperature to fall to -50 degrees Celsius. The experiment proved that the cold temperature was enough to retain data on chips for a longer period of time, and thus permitting data extraction from the memory chips.

And that was just with the help of a dust spray! Imagine what liquid nitrogen (-196 degrees Celsius) could do! Data would be stored for hours, without any power, which would leave plenty of time for unauthorized data transfer. That goes to show nothing is as safe as we thought it was.

The experiment included systems such as BitLocker (Microsoft), TrueCrypt (Linux) or FileVault (Apple), but the conclusion extended to other similar systems. The study pointed out that “many who design, deploy, or rely on secure systems are unaware of these phenomena or the ease with which they can be exploited.”