Asian Tech Press (Jan 14) -- Micron Technology Inc., the largest U.S. maker of memory chips, said on Wednesday that a potential vulnerability in its SATA SSDs could hardly be exploited, but the company will still roll out a firmware update to help users concerned about the issue.

This follows a paper published via IEEE Xplore, titled "Forensic Issues and Techniques to Improve Security in SSD With Flex Capacity Feature," which has raised questions about "the variable over-provisioning capability in industry devices that use the ATA standard set max address command, including the Micron 5200 SSD."

Micron released a statement saying that it took data security very seriously and has done an in-depth investigation into the issue and did find a related potential vulnerability that could theoretically exist in two product lines, namely the Micron 5200 and 5300 data center SATA SSDs.

The memory chip maker said that in order to exploit this potential vulnerability, an attacker would have to have privileged authorization to issue special commands to the drives, so it is unlikely to be exposed to users in a virtualized cloud infrastructure or enterprise data center.

Nonetheless, Micron will release an optional firmware update to address this potential vulnerability for any customers concerned about this issue with affected products.