GANGRENE: exploring the mortality of flash memory
Robert Templeman, Apu Kapadia · 2012
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 character-istics, but its key weakness is limited write endurance. Endurance limits continue to decrease as smaller inte-grated 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 un-der 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 vulnerabil-ity. Because of the high penetration of flash memory, the threat of such attacks deserves attention by vendors and researchers in the community. We propose recom-mendations and mitigations for GANGRENE and sug-gest future work to address such vulnerabilities. 1