The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

Users of solid-state disks and mobile devices may benefit from the ability to hide sensitive data in a manner that disallows powerful adversaries from detecting that data has been hidden. In this talk I present a new technique to achieve this goal by manipulating the voltage level of randomly selected flash cells to encode two bits (rather than one), such that one bit is "public" and the other is private. Our technique leverages the inherent differences between individual flash chips and the inherent noisiness of flash cell voltage levels. We demonstrate that our hidden data and underlying voltage manipulations go undetected by support vector machine based supervised learning. Our scheme also experiences low error rates that make the data recoverable months after being stored. Compared to prior work, our technique provides 24x and 50x higher encoding and decoding throughput and doubles the capacity, while being 37x more power efficient. This research project, supported by the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF) and US National Science Foundation (NSF), is a collaborative effort with researchers from Technion, Caltech, and University of North Carolina.

Bio:
Aviad is a post-doc at Technion's Computer Science Lab, working with Prof. Dan Tsafrir. His research interests are in the intersection of new storage technologies and data security. Aviad received his M.Sc. and a Ph.D. from Tel Aviv University, done under the supervision of Prof. Sivan Toledo, and has worked over the years in several leading storage groups in industry, including IBM, Microsoft, and PMC-Sierra