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Presentation
Sanitizing data is not enough! Towards sanitizing structural artifacts in flash media
2016 Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (2016)
  • Bo Chen, University of Memphis
  • Shijie Jia, Chinese Academy of Sciences
  • Luning Xia, Chinese Academy of Sciences
  • Peng Liu, The Pennsylvania State University
Abstract
Conventional overwriting-based and encryption-based secure deletion schemes can only sanitize data. However, the past existence of the deleted data may leave artifacts in the layout at all layers of a computing system. These structural artifacts may be utilized by the adversary to infer sensitive information about the deleted data or even to fully recover them. The conventional secure deletion solutions unfortunately cannot sanitize them. 

In this work, we introduce truly secure deletion, a novel security notion that is much stronger than the conventional secure deletion. Truly secure deletion requires sanitizing both the obsolete data as well as the corresponding structural artifacts, so that the resulting storage layout after a delete operation is indistinguishable from that the deleted data never appeared. We propose TedFlash, a Truly secure deletion scheme for Flash-based block devices. TedFlash can successfully sanitize both the data and the structural artifacts, while satisfying the design constraints imposed for flash memory. Security analysis and experimental evaluation show that TedFlash can achieve the truly secure deletion guarantee with a small additional overhead compared to conventional secure deletion solutions.
Publication Date
December 9, 2016
Location
Los Angeles, California
Comments
Citation Information
Bo Chen, Shijie Jia, Luning Xia and Peng Liu. "Sanitizing data is not enough! Towards sanitizing structural artifacts in flash media" 2016 Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (2016)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/bo-chen/6/