SATA Protocol implementation on FPGA for Write Protection of Hard Disk Drive/Solid State Device

Write protection of storage media is essential in cyber forensics which ensures data integrity in storage devices. In order to write protect the storage devices such as Hard Disk Drive (HDD) or Solid State Device (SSD), hardware based solution is secure and better than the software based solution. Software based approach implements under an operating system that is susceptible to viruses and other attacks. An operating system, by definition, provides open access to applications and thus exposes these access points to improper use. Software can be corrupted or negated, while hardware cannot and hence Hardware based approach ensures root of trust. In fact, dedicated hardware can always out-perform software running on a general purpose OS-based platform with respect to performance and security benchmarking. In this paper, Xilinx's Kintex-7 FPGA based hardware with 2 SATA interfaces is used to implement SATA protocol with write protection for Hard Disk Drive (HDD) or Solid State Device (SSD). SATA Bridge IP core with write protection module is implemented on Kintex-7 FPGA which enables only data read operations and disables write operations of HDD/SSD.