Tresor

Tresor (German for safe or vault) is an underground techno nightclub in Berlin and a record label. The club was founded in March 1991 in the vaults of the former old Wertheim department store at Leipziger Strasse 126-128 in Mitte, the central part of the former East Berlin, next to the famous Potsdamer Platz. However, the history of the club goes back to 1988 when the electronic music label Interfisch opened the Ufo Club in Berlin. Ufo was the original centre of Berlin house and techno, but due to financial problems that club closed in 1990.

After Ufo closed, Interfisch's head, Dimitri Hegemann and some investors in the club found the new space in East Berlin. This was advantageous timing, as it was only a few months before Germany unified. The vaults under the Wertheim department store proved to be the perfect location for a club, and Tresor quickly became the place to be in Berlin. Tresor continued to be a popular club to this day, having expanded and reconstructed continuously several times to include an outdoor garden area, and a second "Globus" floor. The concept for the Tresor floor in the basement was specifically hard techno, industrial and acid music while Globus was featuring mainly more mellow house sound. The recordlabel Tresor Records was founded soon after the club first opened, in October 1991. Featured artists on the label include Jeff Mills, Blake Baxter, Juan Atkins, Robert Hood, Stewart Walker, Joey Beltram, DJ Surgeon, Pacou, Cristian Vogel and many others.

TRESOR

TRESOR (recursive acronym for "TRESOR Runs Encryption Securely Outside RAM", and also the German word for a safe) is a Linux kernel patch which provides CPU-only based encryption to defend against cold boot attacks on computer systems by performing encryption outside usual random-access memory (RAM). It is one of two proposed solutions for general-purpose computers (the other uses CPU cache for the same purpose), was developed from its predecessor AESSE, presented at EuroSec 2010 and presented at USENIX Security 2011. The authors state that it allows RAM to be treated as untrusted from a security viewpoint without hindering the system.

A 2012 paper called TRESOR-HUNT showed how a DMA attack can break this system, by injecting code that would invisibly function at ring 0 (the highest privilege level), which would allow it to read the keys and transfer them to usual memory. The paper also proposed ways to mitigate against such attacks.

Motivation

In computer security, a common problem for data security is how an intruder can access encrypted data on a computer. Modern encryption algorithms, correctly implemented and with strong passwords, are often unbreakable with current technology, so emphasis has moved to techniques that bypass this requirement, by exploiting aspects of data security where the encryption can be "broken" with much less effort, or else bypassed completely.