Brian Easter TASC Security Certification Services November 2013 New Technology: Solid State Hard Drives, Considerations & Concerns

 Solid State Drives – What they are, why we care  Advantages  Concerns  (SSD Test Video, time allowing) Overview 2 You Can’t Manage Risks You Don’t Understand

Solid State Drives (SSD) 3 What are they?  Non-volatile Flash memory  No Moving Parts  Standard HD interface  Shock-resistant, silent, low power draw  Outperforming Hard Drives now, and still getting faster

SSD Power Draw, Other Factors 4 Other Attributes Solid State DriveHard Disk Drive Cost Expensive, $1.00 per gigabyte Inexpensive, $0.10 per gigabyte Capacity Typically not larger than 512GB 500GB – 2TB are common, larger drives available NoiseSilentVariable, but some noise VibrationNoneSome Vibration Heat Produced Very little More heat, a consideration for laptops Failure Rate Mean time between failure rate of 2.0 million hours Mean time between failure rate of 1.5 million hours Affected by Magnetic Fields? An SSD is safe from any effects of magnetism Magnets can erase data

SSD Speed 5 WD Caviar Black HD Intel X25 SSD

SSD Speed – Potential Super Talent – SSD Using PCIe Interface Read Speeds WD HD =.7 Gb/s Intel SSD = 1.9 Gb/s RAIDDrive = 19.2 Gb/s DDR SDRAM = 66 Gb/s

 Hard Drive Formatting uses tracks, sectors  SSD formatting uses memory cells, pages, blocks  OS uses HD commands, Flash Controller translates SSD Flash Controller Issues 7 Hard Drive Operating System: “Write to Track X, Sector Y” Flash Controller: “OK, I did it” but actually writes differently SSD Flash Memory

Solid State Drives: The Beginning of the End for Current Practice in Digital Forensic Recovery? Graeme B. Bell, Richard Boddington, JDFSL [SSDs] “can operate under their own volition in the absence of computer instructions. Such operations are highly destructive of traditionally recoverable data. This can contaminate evidence; can obfuscate and make validation of digital evidence reports difficult; can complicate the process of live and dead analysis recovery; and can complicate and frustrate the post recovery forensic analysis. Our experimental findings demonstrate that SSDs have the capacity to destroy evidence catastrophically under their own volition, in the absence of specific instructions to do so from a computer.” SSD Forensic problems 8

From the Research paper “Reliably Erasing Data From Flash-Based Solid State Drives”, Michael Wei, et. Al. SSD Wiping problems 9 Single File Sanitization

 Embrace the concept – SSDs are here to stay  Talk to your customers before moving to SSD  Make sure Purchasing and IT Staff coordinate SSD use with Security So, What To Do? 10

11 Brian Easter TASC (719)