Toward instantaneous sanitization through disturbance-induced errors and recycling programming over 3D flash memory

As data security has become one of the most crucial issues in modern storage system/application designs, the data sanitization techniques are regarded as the promising solution on 3D NAND flash-memory-based devices. Many excellent works had been proposed to exploit the in-place reprogramming, erasure and encryption techniques to achieve and implement the sanitization functionalities. However, existing sanitization approaches could lead to performance, disturbance overheads or even deciphered issues. Different from existing works, this work aims at exploring an instantaneous data sanitization scheme by taking advantage of programming disturbance properties. Our proposed design can not only achieve the instantaneous data sanitization by exploiting programming disturbance and error correction code properly, but also enhance the performance with the recycling programming design. The feasibility and capability of our proposed design are evaluated by a series of experiments on 3D NAND flash memory chips, for which we have very encouraging results. The experiment results show that the proposed design could achieve the instantaneous data sanitization with low overhead; besides, it improves the average response time and reduces the number of block erase count by up to 86.8% and 88.8%, respectively.