Algorithms and data structures for flash memories
ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)
On efficient wear leveling for large-scale flash-memory storage systems
Proceedings of the 2007 ACM symposium on Applied computing
Data remanence in semiconductor devices
SSYM'01 Proceedings of the 10th conference on USENIX Security Symposium - Volume 10
Disk failures in the real world: what does an MTTF of 1,000,000 hours mean to you?
FAST '07 Proceedings of the 5th USENIX conference on File and Storage Technologies
Write amplification analysis in flash-based solid state drives
SYSTOR '09 Proceedings of SYSTOR 2009: The Israeli Experimental Systems Conference
Characterizing flash memory: anomalies, observations, and applications
Proceedings of the 42nd Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture
Empirical evaluation of NAND flash memory performance
ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review
Extending SSD lifetimes with disk-based write caches
FAST'10 Proceedings of the 8th USENIX conference on File and storage technologies
Write endurance in flash drives: measurements and analysis
FAST'10 Proceedings of the 8th USENIX conference on File and storage technologies
HotStorage'10 Proceedings of the 2nd USENIX conference on Hot topics in storage and file systems
Protecting portable storage with host validation
Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer and communications security
Kells: a protection framework for portable data
Proceedings of the 26th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference
Competitive analysis of flash memory algorithms
ACM Transactions on Algorithms (TALG)
A study of practical deduplication
FAST'11 Proceedings of the 9th USENIX conference on File and stroage technologies
A comprehensive black-box methodology for testing the forensic characteristics of solid-state drives
Proceedings of the 29th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference
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Flash memory is used for non-volatile storage in a vast array of devices that touch users at work, at home, and at play. Flash memory offers many desirable characteristics, but its key weakness is limited write endurance. Endurance limits continue to decrease as smaller integrated circuit architectures and greater storage densities are pursued. There is a significant body of published work demonstrating methods to extend flash endurance under normal use, but performance of these methods under malicious use has not been adequately researched. We introduce GANGRENE, an attack to accelerate wear of flash devices to induce premature failure. By testing a sampling of flash drives, we show that wear can be accelerated by an order of magnitude. Our results offer evidence that vendor-provided endurance ratings, based on normal use, ignore this underlying vulnerability. Because of the high penetration of flash memory, the threat of such attacks deserves attention by vendors and researchers in the community. We propose recommendations and mitigations for GANGRENE and suggest future work to address such vulnerabilities.