Facilitating the Efficiency of Secure File Data and Metadata Deletion on SMR-based Ext4 File System

Abstract

The efficiency of secure deletion is highly dependent on the data layout of underlying storage devices. In particular, owing to the sequential-write constraint of the emerging Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) technology, an improper data layout could lead to serious write amplification and hinder the performance of secure deletion. The performance degradation of secure deletion on SMR drives is further aggravated with the need to securely erase the file system metadata of deleted files due to the small-size nature of file system metadata. Such an observation motivates us to propose a secure-deletion and SMR-aware space allocation (SSSA) strategy to facilitate the process of securely erasing both the deleted files and their metadata simultaneously. The proposed strategy is integrated within the widely-used extended file system 4 (ext4) and is evaluated through a series of experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy. The evaluation results show that the proposed strategy can reduce the secure deletion latency by 91.3% on average when compared with naive SMR-based ext4 file system.