[fuzzfactor]

For anybody involved with research of any nature, you don't need to be interested in HDDs or SSDs or even hacking hardware or software of any kind.

This says a lot right here:

>One of my initial ideas was to modify the HDD firmware to introduce a delay of a few hundred milliseconds when a specific sector is read from the drive, which would give enough time for the exploit to trigger successfully.

>As it would later turn out I found other ways to dial in my race condition attack and ended up not needing to modify the HDD firmware at all.

The result is a remarkable paper documenting outstanding milestones that is outstanding on its own, and was completely unintentional to begin with, and with subject matter that was also unintentional if not a completely unrelated subject than the direction that the initial ambition was leading toward.

If your research leaders or techniques don't allow for excursions like this, you'd probably be better off getting some.