Issues and Trends in Reliably Sanitizing Solid State Disks

Issues and Trends in Reliably Sanitizing Solid State Disks

Michael Wei, University of California, San Diego

Reliably erasing data from storage media (sanitizing the media) is a critical component of secure data management. While sanitizing entire disks and individual files is well understood for hard drives, flash-based solid state disks have a very different internal architecture. Our lab has evaluated the effectiveness of state-of-the-art sanitization on solid state disks (SSDs) and determined that it is unreliable and could lead to a false sense of security. This talk focuses on the issues and trends today in solid state disk sanitization.