> Could you provide a link to this study? I believe some SSD devices do > offer the ATA Secure Erase command these days. It would be good to have > a pointer to a concrete demonstration that this is unreliable, if that's > the case.
Sure! Best source was a talk at the 2010 USENIX FAST (File and Storage Technologies) conference. From this link you can get the abstract, full paper, and the video of their presentation: http://www.usenix.org/events/fast11/tech/tech.html#Wei Here are the slides for the presentation: http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/users/m3wei/assets/pdf/FMS-2010-Secure-Erase.pdf They tried 14 different popular ways to securely erase individual files. All failed, leaving large parts of the data accessible in the flash chips! Some SSD drives supported the whole-drive secure erase command; some didn't; and some that did were buggy and didn't actually erase everything. One that didn't support it, claimed support but was a no-op! The problem is much worse on USB flash drives, because there isn't even a Secure Erase command defined to erase the entire drive. (Let alone any command to securely erase a portion of the drive, such as a single file.) Here's contact info for the professor involved: Dr. Steven Swanson <[email protected]> Assistant Professor Computer Science & Engineering University of California, San Diego 9500 Gilman Drive #0404 La Jolla CA 92093-0404 (858)534-1743 http://www.cse.ucsd.edu/users/swanson/ John Gilmore _______________________________________________ Freedombox-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss
