Security News > 2011 > February > Flash drives dangerously hard to purge of sensitive data

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/21/flash_drive_erasing_peril/ By Dan Goodin in San Francisco The Register 21st February 2011 In research that has important findings for banks, businesses and security buffs everywhere, scientists have found that computer files stored on solid state drives are sometimes impossible to delete using traditional disk-erasure techniques. Even when the next-generation storage devices show that files have been deleted, as much as 75 percent of the data contained in them may still reside on the flash-based drives, according to the research, which is being presented this week at the Usenix FAST 11 conference in California. In some cases, the SSDs, or sold-state drives, incorrectly indicate the files have been "securely erased" even though duplicate files remain in secondary locations. The difficulty of reliably wiping SSDs stems from their radically different internal design. Traditional ATA and SCSI hard drives employ magnetizing materials to write contents to a physical location that's known as the LBA, or logical block address. SSDs, by contrast, use computer chips to store data digitally and employ an FTL, or flash translation later, to manage the contents. When data is modified, the FTL frequently writes new files to a different location and updates its map to reflect the change. In the process left-over data from the old file, which the authors refer to as digital remnants, remain. [...] ___________________________________________________________ Tegatai Managed Colocation: Four Provider Blended Tier-1 Bandwidth, Fortinet Universal Threat Management, Natural Disaster Avoidance, Always-On Power Delivery Network, Cisco Switches, SAS 70 Type II Datacenter. Find peace of mind, Defend your Critical Infrastructure. http://www.tegataiphoenix.com/

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http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/21/flash_drive_erasing_peril/