HiFlash: A History Independent Flash Device

Retention regulations require timely and irrecoverable disposal of data, a challenging task, as data and its side effects are stored and maintained at all layers of a computing system. Those side effects can be used as an oracle to derive the past existence of deleted data. Fortunately, history independence can be utilized to eliminate such history-related oracles. HIFS [19] can provide history independence for file storage over mechanical disk drives. However, HIFS cannot provide history independence when deployed on top of flash devices, as flash memory manages its own internal block placement, which is often inherently history dependent. In this work, we initiate research on history independent flash devices. We design HiFlash, which achieves a strong notion of history independence by defending against an adversary allowed access to the flash at multiple different points in time. In addition, we design a simple, yet history independence friendly wear-leveling mechanism that allows HiFlash to smartly and advantageously trade off a tunable small amount of history leakage for a significant increase in the device’s lifetime. Our prototype built in an actual flash device as well as extensive simulations validate the effectiveness of HiFlash.