Secret Spilling Drive: Leaking User Behavior through SSD Contention
Jonas Juffinger
Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium 2025 · Day 2 · Side Channels 1
In an era where Solid State Drives (SSDs) are rapidly becoming the dominant storage technology across computing platforms, the talk "Secret Spilling Drive: Leaking User Behavior through SSD Contention" by Jonas Juffinger and his collaborators Fabian Rousa, Jeppelana, and Stin, unveils critical and often overlooked security vulnerabilities inherent in these high-performance devices. Presented at the NDSS Symposium, this research meticulously investigates whether the high speed and parallel processing capabilities of modern SSDs truly shield them from the contention-based side-channel attacks that have long plagued traditional Hard Disk Drives (HDDs). The findings present a stark challenge to the prevailing assumption that SSDs, due to their internal architecture and speed, are largely immune to such timing-based information leakage.
AI review
Solid, original hardware side-channel research that systematically dismantles the 'SSDs are too fast to leak timing' assumption across 12 devices, building to a 97%-accurate website fingerprinting attack and a covert channel that blows HDD-based predecessors out of the water by four orders of magnitude. The VM-to-VM channel breaking storage isolation boundaries is the headline result that matters most for cloud security practitioners.