R&D: Instant Data Sanitization on MLC NAND Flash Memory

ACM Digital Library has published, in SYSTOR ’22: Proceedings of the 15th ACM International Conference on Systems and Storage proceedings, an article written by Md Raquibuzzaman, Matchima Buddhanoy, Aleksandar Milenkovic, and Biswajit Ray, The University of Alabama in Huntsville, USA.

Abstract: “Deleting data instantly from NAND flash memories incurs hefty overheads, and increases wear level. Existing solutions involve unlinking the physical page addresses making data inaccessible through standard interfaces, but they carry the risk of data leakage. An all-zero-in-place data overwrite has been proposed as a countermeasure, but it applies only to SLC flash memories. This paper introduces an instant page data sanitization method for MLC flash memories that prevents leakage of deleted information without any negative effects on valid data in shared pages. We implement and evaluate the proposed method on commercial 2D and 3D NAND flash memory chips.“