Award Abstract # 1526707
NSFSaTC-BSF: TWC: Small: Practical Plausibly Deniable Encryption through Low-Level Storage Device Behavior

NSF Org: CNS
Division Of Computer and Network Systems
Recipient: THE RESEARCH FOUNDATION FOR THE STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
Initial Amendment Date: July 24, 2015
Latest Amendment Date: November 18, 2016
Award Number: 1526707
Award Instrument: Standard Grant
Program Manager: Shannon Beck
CNS
 Division Of Computer and Network Systems
CSE
 Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering
Start Date: September 1, 2015
End Date: August 31, 2019 (Estimated)
Total Intended Award Amount: $499,999.00
Total Awarded Amount to Date: $499,999.00
Funds Obligated to Date: FY 2015 = $499,999.00
History of Investigator:
  • Radu Sion (Principal Investigator)
    sion@cs.stonybrook.edu
  • Donald Porter (Co-Principal Investigator)
  • Donald Porter (Former Principal Investigator)
  • Radu Sion (Former Co-Principal Investigator)
Recipient Sponsored Research Office: SUNY at Stony Brook
W5510 FRANKS MELVILLE MEMORIAL LIBRARY
STONY BROOK
NY  US  11794
(631)632-9949
Sponsor Congressional District: 01
Primary Place of Performance: SUNY at Stony Brook
NY  US  11794-4400
Primary Place of Performance
Congressional District:
01
Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): M746VC6XMNH9
Parent UEI: M746VC6XMNH9
NSF Program(s): Secure &Trustworthy Cyberspace
Primary Program Source: 01001516DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
Program Reference Code(s): 014Z, 7923, 7434
Program Element Code(s): 806000
Award Agency Code: 4900
Fund Agency Code: 4900
Assistance Listing Number(s): 47.070

ABSTRACT

Plausibly deniable encryption is the ability to hide that given data is on a device, whether the ability exists to decrypt it, or even that the data exists. Plausible deniability is a powerful property to protect data on devices the user has lost physical control over, such as protecting consumers from accidental mass disclosures of private data through misplaced devices. This issue is of particular concern for anyone who travels internationally with sensitive data, including human rights workers, diplomats, military personnel, or even business travelers. This project leverages low-level characteristics of flash and other emergent persistent memories to hide data with plausible deniability, improving performance and capacity over the state of the art.

This project investigates a unique opportunity to implement plausibly deniable encryption using the underlying electrical properties of flash memory. The promising property of flash is that the same hardware cell can encode data in multiple ways, and adjust the encoding dynamically. This project integrates this encoding mechanism with data hiding: as long as the encoding follows an expected voltage distribution, an adversary cannot discern the precise encoding technique or how much data is encoded. This project also investigates firmware-level techniques to manage hidden data; extends these techniques to emerging persistent memories, such as phase change memory; and augments widely-used flash simulators. This project develops novel teaching materials for low-level flash programming.

PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH

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Anrin Chakraborti, Chen Chen, Radu Sion "DataLair: Efficient Block Storage with Plausible Deniability against Multi-Snapshot Adversaries" Privacy Enhancing Technologies PETS , 2017
Chen Chen, Anrin Chakraborti, Radu Sion "PD-DM: An efficient locality-preserving block device mapper with plausible deniability" PETS , 2019
Anrin Chakraborti, Radu Sion "SqORAM: Read-Optimized Sequential Write-Only ORAM" Privacy Enhancing Technologies PETS , 2020
Aviad Zuck, Yue Li, Jehoshua Bruck, Donald E. Porter, and Dan Tsafrir "Stash in a Flash" Planned submission to 16th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST '18) , 2018
Anrin Chakraborti, Chen Chen, and Radu Sion "DataLair: A Storage Block Device with Plausible Deniability" 23rd ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security , 2017

PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT

Disclaimer

This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.

Plausibly deniable encryption is the ability to hide that given data is on a device, whether the ability exists to decrypt it, or even that the data exists. Plausible deniability is a powerful property to protect data on devices the user has lost physical control over, such as protecting consumers from accidental mass disclosures of private data through misplaced devices. This issue is of particular concern for anyone who travels internationally with sensitive data, including human rights workers, diplomats, military personnel, or even business travelers.

This project leveraged low-level characteristics of flash and other emergent persistent memories to hide data with plausible deniability, improving performance and capacity over the state of the art. One of the main ideas was to implement plausibly deniable encryption using the underlying electrical properties of flash memory. The promising property of flash is that the same hardware cell can encode data in multiple ways and adjust the encoding dynamically. This project integrated this encoding mechanism with data hiding: as long as the encoding follows an expected voltage distribution, an adversary cannot discern the precise encoding technique or how much data is encoded. This project also investigated firmware-level techniques to manage hidden data; extends these techniques to emerging persistent memories, such as phase change memory; and augments widely-used flash simulators. This project developed novel teaching materials for low-level flash programming. Finally, this project developed secure high-level constructs such as file systems that for the first time can defeat realistic nation-state adversaries that can encounter and attack unsuspecting users repeatedly over time.


Last Modified: 10/09/2019
Modified by: Radu Sion

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