Patent ID: 7865740

Claim:
A method, comprising: maintaining security bits for blocks of cells in a non-volatile memory device indicating whether data in the blocks has been modified; setting a lock bit, wherein the lock bit has a first or second value; receiving a write request of data to write to a target block of the blocks of cells; writing the write request data to the target block; determining if the lock bit is set to the first or the second value; setting the security bit for the target block to indicate modification in response to determining that the lock bit has the first value, wherein the security bit for the target block is not set to indicate modification when the lock bit has the second value; validating data in the blocks whose security bits indicate that the blocks were modified; executing code in the non-volatile memory device to perform a boot sequence to initialize a runtime environment; and updating a block in the memory device, wherein the security bit associated with the updated block is not set to indicate that the block was modified when updating the block during the boot sequence, and wherein the security bit is set in response to updating the associated block after the boot sequence.