reduce the functionality of the TrueCrypt boot loader and do not hide the content of the TrueCrypt boot loader from offline analysis. Here again, the use of a hidden operating system is the suggested method for retaining deniability. Performance TrueCrypt supports parallelized encryption for multi-core systems and, under Microsoft Windows, pipelined read/write operations (a form of asynchronous processing) to reduce the performance hit of encryption and decryption. On newer processors supporting the AES-NI instruction set, TrueCrypt supports hardware-accelerated AES to further improve performance. The performance impact of disk encryption is especially noticeable on operations which would normally use direct memory access (DMA), as all data must pass through the CPU for decryption, rather than being copied directly from disk to RAM. In a test carried out by Tom's Hardware, although TrueCrypt is slower compared to an unencrypted disk, the overhead of real-time encryption was found to be similar regardless of whether mid-range or state-of-the-art hardware is in use, and this impact was "quite acceptable". In another article the performance cost was found to be unnoticeable when working with "popular desktop applications in a reasonable manner", but it was noted that "power users will complain". Incompatibility with FlexNet Publisher and SafeCast Installing third-party software which uses FlexNet Publisher or SafeCast (which are used for preventing software piracy on products by Adobe such as Adobe Photoshop) can damage the TrueCrypt bootloader on Windows partitions/drives encrypted by TrueCrypt and render the drive unbootable. This is caused by the inappropriate design of FlexNet Publisher writing to the first drive track and overwriting whatever non-Windows bootloader exists there. Security concerns TrueCrypt is vulnerable to various known attacks which are also present in other disk encryption software releases such as BitLocker. To prevent those, the documentation distributed with TrueCrypt requires users to follow various security precautions. Some of those attacks are detailed below. Encryption keys stored in memory TrueCrypt stores its keys in RAM; on an ordinary personal computer the DRAM will maintain its contents for several seconds after power is cut (or longer if the temperature is lowered). Even if there is some degradation in the memory contents, various algorithms can intelligently recover the keys. This method, known as a cold boot attack (which would apply in particular to a notebook computer obtained while in power-on, suspended, or screen-locked mode), has been successfully used to attack a file system protected by TrueCrypt. Physical security TrueCrypt