Why physical destruction of RAM is sometimes necessary

I found this photograph along with the question about its intent. The photo was a RAM module with holes drilled in it. The person who posted the photograph asked a very valid question as to why physical destruction of RAM is necessary.

Doesn’t RAM erase itself?

I have known since the second grade that computers lose the contents of RAM when you shut off the power. Someone younger than me probably learned that at even younger age than I did.

But that thing we learned about RAM when we were very young and first learning about how to use the computer is a little more nuanced than that. Cutting the power doesn’t immediately blank out the content of memory. Rather, the contents of the memory start degrading. You can actually observe this with certain older 8-bit computers like an Apple II, or a Commodore Plus/4 or Commodore 128. These computers don’t blank the screen immediately when you turn them on, so you can see the contents of the memory in the form of a garbage screen while they initialize. If you turn one of these computers off and back on very quickly, you can see a corrupted version of the screen it was displaying before you cut the power.

It is possible to find stories of people recovering data from the memory of a computer after it had been shut off. For best results, you need to keep the memory add an extremely low temperature. At room temperature, the content of memory become too corrupt to recover after a few hours, if not a few minutes.

So, who drills holes in computer memory before getting rid of it?

I have an idea.

Classified information and RAM

Way back in 2012, I worked on a government contract that dealt with the handling of classified information. It may surprise you to hear we spent more time talking about what the private sector calls defense in depth then anything else, but I can share a couple of stories without getting into any trouble.

We had a printer in the office that all of us hated. It was well past its prime and was slow and unreliable. I knew enough about printers to nurse the thing back to health, but all I could do was delay the inevitable. The documents we produced weren’t getting any smaller or any less complex, so one fine day, we got a new printer.

After getting the new printer set up, the technician who installed the new printer set about disassembling the old printer for disposal. The main reason I remember the story is because the technician walked over to me with something in his hand. It was the RAM module out of the printer. “I need to shred this, don’t I?” he asked.

I’m pretty sure everyone else in the office heard my eyes rolling. Yes, I said. Then I asked him if he would also take the toner cartridge with him and shred that as well. The likelihood of anyone recovering any data from the drum in the toner cartridge was much higher than recovering anything from a memory module and a printer that had been turned off for several hours.

Shredders for printed circuit boards do exist, so he may very well have meant literal shredding rather than simply drilling holes in the module.

Is drilling holes in a memory module overkill?

So is drilling holes in a memory module after decommissioning the system it came from overkill? I could argue that it usually is. But I learned about 15 years ago that is not worth having the argument over a memory module that is worth less than $50.

The reason is because the people who enforce the rules don’t know how most of this stuff works. They don’t know how quickly the contents of RAM modules degrade, they’ve just been told it’s possible to recover data from them. They weren’t told under what circumstances. Don’t count on them knowing the difference between dynamic RAM, static RAM, flash memory, or a spinning hard drive. And arguing the point only does more to convince them that they know something you don’t. In their defense, they don’t make the rules. Furthermore, if they think they caught you breaking the rules and you managed to convince them otherwise, that doesn’t mean they can articulate your argument to someone else if they are ever asked about it.

When in doubt, shred it. Or drill holes in it.

When in doubt, physically destroying hardware unnecessarily gets you in a lot less trouble than not destroying something that someone thinks should be destroyed will. You won’t lose your security clearance over destroying an entire printer, but if someone catches you not destroying the memory module from the printer, you could lose your security clearance over that.

My comment when I saw that photo of a memory module with holes drilled in it is that it’s a lot easier to walk over to the drill press and drill eight holes than it is to have the argument over whether it’s necessary.

I did find it really humorous that one of the holes they drilled completely missed the chip. By the letter of the law, that probably doesn’t matter. The person enforcing the law probably has no idea it matters. But for the destruction to meet the actual intent of the law, they really need to drill the hole through the die of the chip, which is going to be in the center of each chip.

So my theory is that memory module with holes drilled in it came out of a system belonging to a company that processes classified information, but can’t justify the cost of equipment to actually shred a memory module, so someone did a good enough job with a $99 drill press.