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Back in my Commodore 64 days, a useful trick to gain access to the code of an interesting game or demo was to use a paperclip to force a cold reset. This restarted the machine, but left most of the memory intact, allowing you to nose around to your heart's content.
The basic idea is quite simple: force the target machine to cold boot, bypassing the normal secure shutdown processes that unmount the disk and scrub the keys from memory. You can then dump the memory and hunt through it for the encryption keys and bypass all that tedious cryptanalysis or waiting for the heat death of the universe while you use a brute-force attack.
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