Toward Thermal Imaging Analysis to Characterize Operations of Solid-State Drives via the Temperature Side-Channel

Solid State Drives (SSDs) have become industry standard for data storage due to their compact form factor, high data transfer speeds, and low power consumption. However, each SSD manufacturer uses their own proprietary firmware, meaning the user does not know how data is stored on the SSD. The primary contribution of this work is the demonstration of the capability to classify activity (read and write) on an SSD versus non-activity (idle) using the temperature side-channel. In addition, we present promising initial results using temperature signatures obtained from an infrared camera to classify read, write, and idle operations. Read and write operations were evaluated at 100 MB, 500 MB, and 1000 MB on four industry standard M.2 SSDs. This study demonstrated the ability to determine when an SSD was inactive with 100% recall, while being able to identify an active SSD with at least 94
^%
sensitivity for each of the four SSDs. We were able to classify operations with an accuracy of 80% on three of the four SSDs.