Wiping Old Laptop

securityguy

It was also though a few years ago to be theoretically impossible to recover data from RAM chips after the power was removed

Halderman et al's paper may have only been published in 2008, but Anderson and Kuhn published speculation about it in 1996, and the issue of moving the location of long-term keys within memory in secure systems to avoid remanence has been discussed for longer than that. The requirement to destroy RAM that has held exotic classifications might be a holdover from the days of core storage (which obviously preserves data indefinitely) but it's been on the agenda for a very long time: Army Regulation 380 from 1990 talks about overwriting or destroying RAM, and it's quite clear from the NSA documents from 2000 that the default position is to melt it down (their statement that it's sanitised by removing power is true, given it's in a classified environment already: cold boot attacks require immediate access to the RAM while it's powered, so you can cool it while it's still "live"). Certainly, speculation that RAM is a possible vector for information leakage has been discussed in the open community for at least twenty years.