{"id":117765,"date":"2017-05-24T15:29:30","date_gmt":"2017-05-24T13:29:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/?p=117765"},"modified":"2017-05-24T15:30:03","modified_gmt":"2017-05-24T13:30:03","slug":"security-flaw-discovered-in-ssd-design","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/hardware\/117765-security-flaw-discovered-in-ssd-design","title":{"rendered":"Security flaw discovered in SSD design"},"content":{"rendered":"

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have discovered<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong>an exploitable flaw in\u00a0SSD design.<\/p>\n

The flaw makes SSDs which use multi-cell level (MLC) technology vulnerable to attacks, which cause reduced lifespan and data corruption.<\/p>\n

Single-level cell (SLC) drives are not affected by the flaw, but faster MLC SSDs are vulnerable due to the method they use to write data to their\u00a0flash cells.<\/p>\n

Unlike SLC drives, MLC SSDs write data into a buffer from a flash cell instead of writing from the flash controller.<\/p>\n

This process allows the written data to be intercepted and corrupted as it is being written, which causes file corruption and can reduce the lifespan of the drive.<\/p>\n

SSD\u00a0manufacturers can fix the\u00a0flaw by writing data from the flash controller, but this would increase latency.<\/p>\n

Low latency is a major feature of MLC drives.<\/p>\n

The research did not state whether triple-level cell (TLC) drives were affected, but according to ExtremeTech<\/strong><\/a>, the technology could also be vulnerable due to its similar programming process.<\/p>\n

ExtremeTech also noted that the vulnerability affects 2D NAND manufactured below the 40nm process node, meaning 3D NAND devices using single-shot programming are unaffected \u2013 as they do not use two-stage programming.<\/p>\n

However, once the manufacturing process for 3D NAND advances past 40nm, manufacturers are expected to return to two-stage programming.<\/p>\n

This article first appeared on MyBroadband<\/a><\/strong> and is republished with permission.<\/em><\/p>\n

Now read:\u00a0WD launches SSDs in South Africa \u2013 Pricing and details<\/a><\/strong><\/h4>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have discovered an exploitable flaw in SSD design.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":232,"featured_media":78252,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[18517,22685,2589,24453,24457,2101,24455],"class_list":["post-117765","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-hardware","tag-design","tag-flaw","tag-hard-drive","tag-mlc","tag-slc","tag-ssd","tag-tlc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117765","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/232"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=117765"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117765\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/78252"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=117765"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=117765"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=117765"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}