Exploiting device physics of flash memories for enhancing security and reliability of storage system

Abstract: To address the challenges of exponential data growth, future storage solutions need to provide even higher bit densities, superior performance, greater energy-efficiency, and improved resilience, while guaranteeing security and privacy of end users. These challenges can only be addressed through innovative system design concepts that aptly utilize the physical properties of storage media. While the traditional storage system mainly relies on technology-agnostic algorithmic functions for the ease of portability, such design underutilizes the rich physical properties of the storage media. Thus, state-of-the art storage solutions are inadequate to ensure resilience, energy efficiency, system security and end-user privacy at the edge nodes and extreme environments.

In this talk, I will present a few innovative techniques that will bridge the gap between device and system design approaches to open-up new opportunities for enhancing resilience, security, and privacy of future edge computing/storage applications. I will illustrate how device physics can be used at system-level to derive hardware security primitives for securing NAND flash supply-chain. I will demonstrate our recent attack on recovering deleted information from flash storage using data remanence of memory bits. Finally, I will share my experimental research findings on the radiation effects on the 3D NAND storage and how flash memory can be used for radiation sensing application.

Biography: Biswajit Ray is an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering with the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), AL, USA, where he leads Hardware Security and Reliability Laboratory. Dr. Ray received Ph.D. from Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN and then he worked in SanDisk Corporation, Milpitas, California developing 3D NAND Flash memory technology. Dr. Ray holds 20 U.S. issued patents on non-volatile memory systems, published more than 70 research papers in international journals and conferences. Dr. Ray is a recipient of NSF CAREER Award (2022), NSF EPSCoR Research Fellow (2020) and Outstanding Faculty Award (2022) at UAH.