Secure deletion for flash-based self-encrypting drives

Abstract

Recently, to prevent sensitive data being leaked, self-encrypting drive has been introduced, which encrypts all the data by the drive itself. Although a self-encrypting drive is considered to be secure, all the data stored in the drive might be compromised if the authentication key is exposed. It is, therefore, crucial to provide functions capable of securely deleting individual data in response to a user request or automatically, especially in the flash-based self-encrypting drives. In this paper, we propose a novel design of flash-based self-encrypting drive; in which not only individual data but also data of the previous version left behind during the overwriting can be securely deleted without I/O performance degradation.