Issues and Trends in Reliably Sanitizing Solid State Disks

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.