Abstract
Solid state drives (SSDs) are coming under increased scrutiny as their popularity continues to grow. SSDs differ from their hard disk drive predecessors because they include an onboard layer of firmware to perform required maintenance tasks related to data location mapping, write performance, and drive lifetime management. This firmware layer is transparent to the user and can be difficult to characterize despite its clear potential to impact drive behavior. Flaws and vulnerabilities in this firmware layer have become increasingly common. In this work, we propose and analyze a technique to classify different versions of proprietary firmware on an SSD through the use of current draw measurements. We demonstrate that major groupings of firmware can be classified using current draw measurements not only from explicitly active drive states such as read and write but also from the low power idle state. We achieve pairwise classifications rates near 100% between firmware examples in these different major groupings. Coupling these results with firmware release information, we are able to infer major updates in the firmware timeline for the SSD we examined. We also develop an anomaly detector and achieve detection rates of 100% for samples that reside outside of the reference grouping.
Highlights
Flaws and vulnerabilities continue to plague the growing solid state drive (SSD) market
This section presents the current draw-based classification results for the proprietary firmware released for the Crucial m4 SSD
We demonstrate that it is possible to build an anomaly detector for applications in which trusted examples are available from a reference firmware group and we confirm that the anomaly detector exhibits the behavior that would be expected based on our binary classification results
Summary
Flaws and vulnerabilities continue to plague the growing solid state drive (SSD) market. In 2013, KingFast inadvertently shipped a counterfeit SSD with fake NAND memory to a reviewer [3]. The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Leandros Maglaras. Users have little visibility on the functionality of this proprietary firmware that is needed to map logical memory to physical flash memory and limit physical wear on the transistors. To expose these hidden vulnerabilities, our group has recently demonstrated the use of current draw measurements to provide insight into this functionality [6]–[9].
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