What technical limits do RAM-only servers and WireGuard impose on forensic data recovery?

1. Why RAM-only changes the forensic baseline

Running services entirely in RAM means the usual forensic targets—filesystems, swap, and other persistent stores—are either not used or intentionally wiped, so investigators cannot rely on post-mortem disk recovery to find logs or user data ^{[2] [1]}. Promotional descriptions of RAM-only VPNs emphasize that data “disappears” on power loss and that on-disk recovery is therefore impossible ^[4], but third‑party discussion notes the core point more conservatively: system-level logging becomes transient and largely accidental rather than guaranteed ^[1].

2. Volatility is not absolute: live capture and cold-boot evidence

Volatile memory is fleeting but not unrecoverable in all circumstances; forensic research has shown that RAM contents can sometimes be recovered with specialized live acquisition or cold‑boot techniques if handled before power is lost or by rapidly cooling memory modules to prolong charge retention ^[5]. The sources provided document experiments where freezing improved recoverability and caution that shutting down a machine will typically delete in‑RAM evidence unless countermeasures are taken ^[5]. The practical implication: RAM-only deployments raise the bar for investigators but do not remove all avenues for live-memory forensics when hardware or timing allows ^[5].

3. WireGuard’s protocol trade-offs and what metadata survives

WireGuard focuses on compact, modern cryptography and does not aim to provide obfuscation; the project’s own “known limitations” page warns that certain handshake metadata can be exploited if an attacker later obtains a server’s private key plus recorded traffic, enabling linkage of handshakes to senders even without payload visibility ^[3]. In short, WireGuard provides forward secrecy for data packets but the handshake construction can leave correlation vectors if keys are compromised and packet captures exist ^[3].

4. Operational realities: logs can be moved off the RAM node

Even if a VPN host runs in RAM and avoids local persistent logging, operators can (and some say would) configure explicit logging or export telemetry to other nodes with disks, which restores a forensic trail independent of local volatility ^[1]. Hacker-News discussion highlights that RAM operation “just means” system logs are transient — operators concerned about logging can send records elsewhere — so the deployment model is an operational choice rather than a provable technical firewall against evidence retention ^[1].

5. WireGuard itself is lightweight; resource limits are orthogonal to evidence

WireGuard implementations use very little RAM in practice and do not require large persistent state on the host, so constrained memory environments are common and feasible for RAM-only builds ^{[6] [7]}. Performance limitations or throughput caps reported by operators are separate considerations—WireGuard’s CPU/network behavior may cap throughput in some setups—but these do not materially change the core forensic trade-offs of volatility vs. persistence ^{[8] [6]}.

6. How to interpret vendor claims and what remains uncertain

Marketing claims that RAM wiping makes data “cannot be recovered by anyone” should be read against forensic literature showing live-memory recoverability and against the fact that protocol metadata and external logs can reintroduce evidence ^{[4] [5] [3]}. The reporting available documents the mechanisms and limits but does not provide an exhaustive, adversarial test of every real-world extraction technique, so absolute categorical statements about impossibility go beyond the cited material ^{[4] [5]}.