I am not too familiar with TF-M, so please forgive me if this is a silly question.

The protected storage APIs appear to require the use of on-die flash to store a non-volatile counter that is used for rollback protection. This is severely limiting in terms of the number of writes, because basically you get as many writes as the endurance of the flash on the MCU (for example, the nordic cortex M33 devices have a rated write endurance of 10k cycles per page, and I don't think there is any wear levelling in TF-M). For example, assuming that a device was configured to write to the protected storage on boot, one could pretty easily exhaust this flash in a few hours by continuously power cycling it. Even if the 10k writes is a very conservative rating, it seems pretty likely that the counter flash will fail before UINT32_MAX.

My question is: what happens to the security and functionality of the protected storage if the internal NV flash write fails silently? I don't know much about the semiconductor physics at play here, but presumably it could fail to make the counter a constant number, or fail to a random number. 

I had a quick look but there don't appear to be any checks in the code to ensure that a value was actually written correctly to the NV counters flash in case of silent corruption - it seems to just assume that any error would be detectable by some return code from the flash write driver. I was looking for some check like:

if (value_to_write != value_read_back) return FLASH_WORN_OUT_ERROR;

But I wasn't able to find it. So assuming it isn't actually there, if the counter fails to a constant (which is not UINT32_MAX) then presumably the rollback protection would be broken for all  writes after that point (and maybe some before depending on the constant). If it fails to a random number, then it would be broken in a more "random" way - ie it would randomly work/not work depending on the value of the counter, until all UINT32_MAX numbers are randomly selected as the counter value.

Also, given that typical AEAD ciphers like AES-GCM typically fail catastrophically with nonce reuse and the protected storage is indeed AEAD (though I can't quite work out yet which cipher is used), if these non-volatile counters are used to generate a nonce then potentially the encryption of the device could be broken just by rebooting the device until the flash is worn out, and then the nonce will be reused if the flash fails to a constant value.

Could someone please help me clear up if my understanding here is correct? As is, I am struggling a bit to understand how to use the protected storage API in a secure way with this constraint, because if an attacker has any way to repeatedly cause a flash write it is basically game over. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Jeremy