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Hide-and-Seek: Hiding Secrets in Threshold Voltage Distributions of NAND Flash Memory Cells

Published: 10 July 2023 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new page-writing technique to hide secret information using the threshold voltage variation of programmed memory cells. We demonstrate the proposed technique on the state-of-the-art commercial 3D NAND flash memory chips by utilizing common user mode commands. We explore the design space metrics of interest for data hiding: bit accuracy of public and secret data and detectability of holding secret data. The proposed method ensures more than 97% accuracy of recovered secret data, with negligible accuracy loss in the public data. Our analysis shows that the proposed technique introduces negligible distortions in the threshold voltage distributions. These distortions are lower than the inherent threshold voltage variations of program states. As a result, the proposed method provides a hiding technique that is undetectable, even by a powerful adversary with low-level access to the memory chips.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      HotStorage '23: Proceedings of the 15th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Storage and File Systems
      July 2023
      131 pages
      ISBN:9798400702242
      DOI:10.1145/3599691
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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      Published: 10 July 2023

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      Author Tags

      1. data hiding
      2. 3D NAND
      3. threshold voltage variation

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