Now safeguard your laptop's data even when it goes to sleep
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In today’s time, cyber crime is becoming an incredibly serious threat. Hackers are exploiting the speed, convenience and anonymity of the Internet to commit a diverse range of criminal activities that know no borders, either physical or virtual, cause serious harm and pose very real threats to victims worldwide.

This is a major reason that leaves many of the people thinking how they can safeguard their personal or professional data stored in the laptops. Worry not! Researchers at Concordia University are out with a solution for you known as Hypnoguard. This powerful new software will help you protect the data even when computer is in sleep mode.

"Protecting data is especially difficult when a computer goes to sleep, which happens when a laptop's lid is closed, or after a certain period of user inactivity," explains PhD candidate Lianying Zhao.

Lianying further adds that if a computer in sleep mode falls in hands of a malicious person, he can extract the data found in the machine's random-access memory (RAM) in a number of technical ways.

The Hynoguard system was developed by Zhao along with Mohammad Mannan, an associate professor with the Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering. According to the researchers, it's designed to protect "data-in-sleep." When installed, the system encrypts the computer's RAM before it enters sleep mode, and then decrypts the data upon waking with hardware-backed uncircumventible user re-authentication.

According to Mannan, "The entire process is transparent to the user, who simply enters a regular 'unlock' password when the computer wakes up. There's almost no impact on usability. For an average computer with eight gigabytes of memory, the process only takes about a second."

He and Zhao designed the system by carefully integrating password-based authentication with widely available hardware security features in modern consumer-grade computers.

The researchers have also filed a provisional US patent for the Hynoguard system, Mannan and Zhao hope that members of the general population as well as corporate and state users will soon be able to use Hypnoguard to protect critical data.

Therefore, professionals for whom security is paramount should benefit from this system if their computer is lost or stolen because Hypnoguard will provide that extra layer of protection against password guessing and coercion attacks.

The researchers lifted curtains of Hypnoguard at the 2016 ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security held in Vienna this October.