Secure File Deletion for Solid State Drives
Solid state drives are becoming more popular for data storage because of their reliability, performance and low power consumption. As the amount of sensitive data stored on these drives increases, the need to securely erase the sensitive information becom
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Solid state drives are becoming more popular for data storage because of their reliability, performance and low power consumption. As the amount of sensitive data stored on these drives increases, the need to securely erase the sensitive information becomes more important. However, this is problematic because the tools and techniques used on traditional hard drives do not always work on solid state drives as a result of differences in the internal architectures. Single file sanitization is highly unreliable and difficult to accomplish on a solid state drive due to wearleveling and related features. This chapter presents a reliable method for individual file sanitization on solid state drives. The method, called FTLSec, integrates a page-based encryption system in the generic flash translation layer. The efficacy of FTLSec is measured using a FlashSim solid state drive simulator. The results are compared with the well-known FAST flash translation layer scheme and an idealized pagemapped flash translation layer.
Keywords: Solid state drives, flash translation layer, secure file deletion
1.
Introduction
Large amounts of sensitive data are stored in digital storage media. The disposal of this sensitive data becomes important when it is no longer needed or when the individuals or organizations desire to replace their outdated computing equipment. Secure data deletion is also a critical component of the disposal policy of government and commercial enterprises. Secure deletion is the process of deleting data so that it becomes non-recoverable [14]. Secure deletion is also referred to as purging, sanitization and erasing. A number of tools, techniques and standards are available for secure deletion from traditional storage devices such as hard c IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2016 Published by Springer International Publishing AG 2016. All Rights Reserved G. Peterson and S. Shenoi (Eds.): Advances in Digital Forensics XII, IFIP AICT 484, pp. 345–362, 2016. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-46279-0 18
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disk drives. However, since solid state drives (SSDs) are relatively new, fewer standards and techniques exist for this type of media. Solid state drives have some advantages over mechanical spinning hard drives, but the flash memory they use has some inherent limitations such as finite erasure cycles [3] and erase-before-write [14]. Solid state drives store data in NAND flash memory, which is compartmented into blocks and pages. Each page contains multiple blocks. Pages are the units of read and write operations while erasures are performed on blocks. A page write must be preceded by an erasure. Because of the differences in atomicity, an erasure is a more costly operation than a read or write. Erasure also significantly degrades the overall write performance of flash memory – each block can be erased only a finite number of times (typically 10,000 to 100,000 times [3]) before it becomes unreliable. To reduce the number of erasures, modern flash solid state drives include a flash tran
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