Educause Security Discussion mailing list archives
Re: Erasing/Wiping Solid State Drives
From: Gary Dobbins <dobbins () ND EDU>
Date: Mon, 17 Aug 2009 16:35:53 -0400
You may want to [re]consult NIST, who I'm told has updated their standard advice to require only a single-pass write of all-zero to be sufficient for magnetic disks. e.g. dd if=/dev/zero etc. Not sure if that applies equally to electronic devices (thumb, SSD') which may store things internally in ways that could enable recovery, but otherwise they too just emulate an array of blocks which could be zeroed as well. It's not clear to me how a 1000-block thumbdrive could retain any valid data, no matter how stored internally, if 1000 blocks worth of replacement data were written to it. From: The EDUCAUSE Security Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU] On Behalf Of James Moore Sent: Monday, August 17, 2009 4:24 PM To: SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU Subject: [SECURITY] Erasing/Wiping Solid State Drives This is an area where I have very little experience. We are using wiping utilities like Eraser (for files & directories) and Darik's Boot and Nuke (for disks). They do passes to overwrite data to reduce possibilities of extracting data due to magnetic remanence. Is there an analog (no pun intended) for solid state drives? Thanks. Jim - - - - Jim Moore, CISSP, IAM Senior Information Security Forensic Investigator Rochester Institute of Technology 151 Lomb Memorial Drive Rochester, NY 14623-5603 (585) 475-5406 (office) (585) 255-0809 (Cell - Incident Reporting & Emergencies) (585) 475-7920 (fax) If you consciously try to thwart opponents, you are already late. Miyamoto Musashi, Japanese philosopher/samurai, 1645 Risk comes from not knowing what you're doing. -Warren Buffet CONFIDENTIALITY NOTE: The information transmitted, including attachments, is intended only for the person(s) or entity to which it is addressed and may contain confidential and/or privileged material. Any review, retransmission, dissemination or other use of, or taking of any action in reliance upon this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient is prohibited. If you received this in error, please contact the sender and destroy any copies of this information
Current thread:
- Erasing/Wiping Solid State Drives James Moore (Aug 17)
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- Re: Erasing/Wiping Solid State Drives Gary Dobbins (Aug 17)