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kosta · Member Joined: 09 Aug 2015 Posts: 161 Location: Salonic

SSD Drives Vulnerable to Attacks That Corrupt User Data
By Catalin Cimpanu

NAND flash memory chips, the building blocks of solid-state drives (SSDs), include what could be called "programming vulnerabilities" that can be exploited to alter stored data or shorten the SSD's lifespan.
At their heart, SSDs are a collection of smaller components named NAND flash memory chips, all clustered together on rows, similar to classic RAM memory chips. Unlike classic RAM memory chips, NAND memory chips are non-volatile, meaning they don't lose their electrical charge (aka the user's data) after the computer is shut off.

According to research published earlier this year, the programming logic powering MLCs is vulnerable to at least two types of attacks.

First Attack: Program Interference
he first of these attacks, which they named a "program interference," takes place when an attacker manages to write data with a certain pattern to a target's SSD.
The exploit's data pattern causes the MLC's programming logic to cause 4.9 more errors than usual, which comes with the side-effect of triggering interference in neighboring NAND flash memory cells.
The side-effects are that an attacker can corrupt local data, or even shorten an SSD's lifetime, if he can cause repeated interference. This is because an SSD's lifetime is defined by the number of finite read-write operations it can perform on its flash memory chips before they lose their ability to remain charged between reboots.

Second Attack: Read Disturb
The second vulnerability researchers discovered in the programming logic of NAND flash memory chips is what they called a "read disturb."
In this attack scenario, an attacker's exploit code causes the SSD to perform a large number of read operations in a very short time, which causes a phenomenon of "read disturb errors."
Researchers say these read disturb errors will "corrupt both pages already written to partially-programmed wordlines and pages that have yet to be written," ruining the SSD's ability to store data in a reliable manner in the future.

SSD Drives Vulnerable to Attacks That Corrupt User Data SSD Drives Vulnerable to Attacks That Corrupt User Data

SSD Drives Vulnerable to Attacks That Corrupt User Data SSD Drives Vulnerable to Attacks That Corrupt User Data

Test rig used by the research team [Source: Research team]

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/hardware/ssd-drives-vulnerable-to-attacks-that-corrupt-user-data/

More details about this research are available in the paper
https://people.inf.ethz.ch/omutlu/pub/flash-memory-programming-vulnerabilities_hpca17.pdf