Recovery of flash memories for reliable mobile storages

Abstract

As the mobile appliance is applied to many ubiquitous services and the importance of the information stored in it is increased, the security issue to protect the information becomes one of the major concerns. However, most previous researches focused only on the communication security, not the storage security. Especially, a flash memory whose operational characteristics are different from those of HDD is used increasingly as a storage device for the mobile appliance because of its resistance to physical shock and lower power requirement. In this paper, we propose a flash memory management scheme targeted for guaranteeing the data integrity of the mobile storage. By maintaining the old data specified during the recovery window, we can recover the old data when the mobile appliance is attacked. Also, to reduce the storage requirement for the recovery, we restrict the number of versions to be copied, called Degree of Integrity (Dol). Especially, we consider both the reclaim efficiency and the wear leveling which is a unique characteristic of the flash memory. Based on the performance evaluation, we confirm that the proposed scheme can be acceptable to many applications as a flash memory management scheme for improving data integrity.