DEFTL: Implementing plausibly deniable encryption in flash translation layer

Shijie Jia, Luning Xia, Bo Chen, Peng Liu

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

32 Scopus citations

Abstract

Mobile devices today have been increasingly used to store and process sensitive information. To protect sensitive data, mobile operating systems usually incorporate a certain level of encryption to protect sensitive data. However, conventional encryption cannot defend against a coercive attacker who can capture the device owner, and force the owner to disclose keys used for decrypting sensitive information. To defend against such a coercive adversary, Plausibly Deniable Encryption (PDE) was introduced to allow the device owner to deny the very existence of sensitive data stored on his/her device. The existing PDE systems, built on flash storage devices, are problematic, since they either neglect the special nature of the underlying storage medium (which is usually NAND flash), or suer from deniability compromises. In this paper, we propose DEFTL, a Deniability Enabling Flash Translation Layer for devices which use-ash-based block devices as storage media. DEFTL is the first PDE design which incorporates deniability to Flash Translation Layer (FTL), a pervasively deployed "translation layer" which stays between NAND-ash and the le system in literally all the computing devices. A salient advantage of DEFTL lies in its capability of achieving deniability while being able to accommodate the special nature of NAND-ash as well as eliminate deniability compromises from it. We implement DEFTL using an open-source NAND flash controller. The experimental results show that, compared to conventional encryption which does not provide deniability, our DEFTL design only incurs a small overhead.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationCCS 2017 - Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages2217-2229
Number of pages13
ISBN (Electronic)9781450349468
DOIs
StatePublished - Oct 30 2017
Event24th ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS 2017 - Dallas, United States
Duration: Oct 30 2017Nov 3 2017

Publication series

NameProceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security
ISSN (Print)1543-7221

Other

Other24th ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS 2017
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityDallas
Period10/30/1711/3/17

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Software
  • Computer Networks and Communications

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