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arXiv · 2508.03866

Flexible In-NAND Cryptographic Processing for Secure Flash Storage

Seock-Hwan Noh·Hoyeon Lee·Junkyum Kim·Junsu Im·Jay H. Park·Sungjin Lee·Sam H. Noh·Yeseong Kim·Jaeha Kung
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Abstract

We present FlashVault, an in-NAND self-encryption architecture that embeds a reconfigurable cryptographic engine into the unused silicon area of a state-of-the-art 4D V-NAND structure. FlashVault supports not only block ciphers for data encryption but also public-key and post-quantum algorithms for digital signatures, all within the NAND flash chip. This design enables each NAND chip to operate as a self-contained enclave without incurring area overhead, while eliminating the need for off-chip encryption. We implement FlashVault at the register-transfer level (RTL) and perform place-and-route (P&R) for accurate power/area evaluation. Our analysis shows that the power budget determines the number of cryptographic engines per NAND chip. We integrate this architectural choice into a full-system simulation and evaluate its performance on a wide range of cryptographic algorithms. Our results show that FlashVault consistently outperforms both CPU-based encryption (1.46~3.45x) and near-core processing architecture (1.02~2.01x), demonstrating its effectiveness as a secure SSD architecture that meets diverse cryptographic requirements imposed by regulatory standards and enterprise policies.

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Seock-Hwan Noh, Hoyeon Lee, Junkyum Kim, Junsu Im, Jay H. Park, Sungjin Lee, Sam H. Noh, Yeseong Kim, Jaeha Kung. 2025-08-05. Flexible In-NAND Cryptographic Processing for Secure Flash Storage. https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03866

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