Single Board Revolution: Preventing Flash Memory Corruption

August 3, 2016 by Moritz Walter 97 Comments

An SD card is surely not an enterprise grade storage solution, but single board computers also aren’t just toys anymore. You find them in applications far beyond the educational purpose they have emerged from, and the line between non-critical and critical applications keeps getting blurred.

Laundry notification hacks and arcade machines fail without causing harm. But how about electronic access control, or an automatic pet feeder? Would you rely on the data integrity of a plain micro SD card stuffed into a single board computer to keep your pet fed when you’re on vacation and you back in afterward? After all, SD card corruption is a well-discussed topic in the Raspberry Pi community. What can we do to keep our favorite single board computers from failing at random, and is there a better solution to the problem of storage than a stack of SD cards?

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Reverse Engineering A NAND Flash Device Management Algorithm

August 6, 2014 by Mathieu Stephan 18 Comments

Put your hand under you chin as here comes a 6 months long jaw-dropping reverse engineering work: getting the data back from a (not so) broken SD card. As you can guess from the picture above, [Joshua]’s first step was to desolder the card’s Flash chip as the tear-down revealed that only the integrated SD-to-NAND Flash controller was damaged. The flash was then soldered on a breadboard so it could be connected to a Digilent Nexys-2 FPGA board. [Joshua] managed to find a similar Flash datasheet, checked that his wire-made bus was reliable and generated two 12GiB dump files on his computer.

In order to extract meaningful data from the dumps he first had to understand how SD-to-NAND controllers work. In his great write-up he provides us with a background of the Flash technology, so our readers can better understand the challenges we face with today’s chips. As flash memories integrate more storage space while keeping the same size, they become less reliable and have nifty problems that should be taken care of. Controllers therefore have to perform data whitening (so neighboring blocks of data don’t have similar content), spread data writes uniformly around the flash (so physical blocks have the same life expectancy) and finally support error correcting codes (so damaged bits can still be recovered). We’ll let our users imagine how complex reverse engineering the implementation of such techniques is when you don’t know anything about the controller. [Joshua] therefore had to do a lot of research, perform a lot of statistical analysis on the data he extracted and when nothing else was possible, use bruteforce…

The Flaming Yinlips

March 6, 2014 by Adam Fabio 11 Comments

furan-yinlips

No, that’s not a Playstation Vita up there, it’s a “Yinlips YDPG18A” portable game system. [Ian] found that his Yinlips was lacking in the flash memory department, so he fired up his soldering iron. The Yinlips is based on an Allwinner Sunxi series processor, and uses a standard TSOP48 footprint flash. There is some standardization in flash pin out and packages, so [Ian] picked up the largest pin compatible chips he could find – a pair of 256 gigabit (32 gigabyte) chips from Micron. Desoldering the existing flash proved to be a bit of an adventure as the flash was glued down. [Ian] also didn’t have his hot air gun handy, making things even more interesting. Careful work with a razor blade broke the glue bond.

It turns out that the soldering was the easy part. All flash chips have geometry, die count, page size, block count, sector size, etc. The geometry is similar to the geometry in a hard drive. In fact, just like in modern hard drives, a system will read some basic information before accessing the full storage array. In the case of NAND flash, the processor can access the first page of memory, and query the flash for its part number. Once the part number is known, the geometry can be determined via a lookup table. [Ian] checked the NAND table on github, so he knew going in that his flash chips were not supported. Due to the complexities of booting Allwinner processors into Linux or Android, the table and the NAND driver that uses it exist in several places. The bootloader’s axf file, U-Boot, and several flash application binaries sent from the PC based LiveSuit flash app all required modification. Most of these files were packed into a single flash image. [Ian] used imgrepacker to unpack the image, then opened the hex files. The fact that he knew what the original flash parameter tables looked like was key. He searched for an existing Micron flash table entry, and replaced the parameters with those of his new chips.

With all the files modified, [Ian] re-packed his flash image and sent it over. The Yinlips rewarded his hard work by continually resetting in a bootloop. [Ian] wasn’t going to give up though. He wired into the boot console, and discovered that a CRC check failure on one of his modified files was causing the reset. He then disassembled binary issuing the reset. Changing the return value of the CRC to always pass fixed the issue. [Ian’s] now has a collagen infused Yinlips with 58GB of internal storage. Pretty good for a device that only started with 2GB.

Reading NAND Flash With An Arduino

January 5, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 15 Comments

[HC] took a gander around the Googles and saw a number of people trying to read NAND flash chips with an Arduino. It’s an interesting problem; at 16 Megahertz, [HC] is looking at about 60 nanoseconds per instruction cycle, and flash chips normally operate around 20 ns. He got the build working, and was able to read the memory contents and ID of a flash chip.

Right now, it’s just a proof-of-concept to demonstrate that reading flash memory is possible. [HC] used an Arduino Mega to pull the manufacture ID off a flash chip. Because there isn’t exactly a whole lot of storage on an Arduino to hold Megabytes of data, so [HC] is looking for a way to pull data off his flash chip. He’s considering sending it over Ethernet or storing it on an SD card.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a roundabout way to use those cheap, ubiquitous NAND flash chips. Considering we’ve got a few dozen of them housed in unused thumb drives, [HC]’s work shows a lot of potential. He posted a topic on his forum to see if there’s any interest in further developments, something we’d like to see.