Secure file deletion for solid state drives

Abstract

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 Flash- Sim solid state drive simulator. The results are compared with the well-known FAST flash translation layer scheme and an idealized pagemapped flash translation layer.