Research on Secure Storage with SATA Command Filtering Based on Logical Isolation Architecture

With the development of information technology, the importance of data security has been continuously increasing. Current research on data security mainly focuses on network security, host security, and application security, with relatively less attention given to storage security. As one of the carriers of storage systems and data, SATA solid-state drives (SSDs) are vulnerable to malicious code that can infect the SSD firmware and boot sectors, enabling unauthorized access to and tampering with sensitive user data, interfering with normal disk read/write operations, and causing data leakage, data corruption, and degradation of disk performance, all of which pose a serious threat to secure data storage. SATA command filtering technology, which reviews all disk access behaviors based on whitelist rules, can prevent malicious code from infecting the disk. Compared with other malicious code protection methods, SATA command filtering technology places a greater emphasis on real-time protection, offering real-time security for storage. To study its ability to protect against malicious code, this paper designs a secure storage SoC based on a logical isolation architecture, which is connected between the host and the hard drive. The firmware of the SoC maintains a whitelist of SATA commands, and a simulation environment is established to verify its functionality. The simulation results show that the SoC can identify the disk partition format without affecting communication between the host and the disk, filter malicious code firmware update behaviors and boot sector tampering, and prevent the infection of the hard disk by malicious code.