So a lot of what this site works on is often assume to be written to Flash media, which has unique storage issues over magnetic drives including power consumption, fragmentation (doesn't matter), and now shredding files. Essentially the issue is that flash drives have a lifetime that is dependent on how many writes (evidently reads are more or less unlimited) are done to the drive, so any tool which wipes files is reducing the life of their media.

Easy answer is of course encrypt the drive from the beginning, but outside of that, what is there?

• Lenovo has a utility they provide on their website for Intel SSDs, which will "erase all contents of the Solid State Drive in a minute." I definitely want to know how that works and how I can get it for other flash media drives.
  
  
• Kingston lists a utility:
  http://www.kingston.com/us/community/ar ... ticleid=10
  
  
• Arch Linux talks about something that seems similar.

ArsTechnica also talks about this:
http://arstechnica.com/security/2011/03 ... ssd-drive/

Any ideas?

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Try SDelete: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysi ... 97443.aspx

We also have WipeDisk in the DB: http://www.portablefreeware.com/index.php?id=1356

And I believe Eraser can do it, too: http://www.portablefreeware.com/index.php?id=267

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Thanks for the link. I didn't know ATA Secure Erase was that unreliable.



No, it's not "the issue". The article mentions that the problem is that all ways to wipe data from Flash drives (except physical destruction) are unreliable.

Of course, it's also an issue that overwriting data, in addition to not working, reduces the lifetime of the drive.



It is likely ATA Secure Erase, which basically just tells the drive to wipe its content. The fact that Lenovo offers such an utility likely means that they use SSDs which support Secure Erase.



The official website of the utility is here.



Here is a better link: https://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/ATA_Secure_Erase.



If you need to wipe data from a Flash drive, I suggest physical destruction.



As the InfoWorld article explains, this kind of tools doesn't work with Flash drives.

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Certainly. I should have written that better.


Good stuff, thanks.


I still have a hard time with this. I read the article and I get that wiping doesn't quite work, but where are these multiple storage spaces floating above the original data that hide all this erased material? If I install 3 different operating systems on one of these drives, does it keep all three? Part of some?


The bar for success among security researchers is pretty high. Wiping is still good for most people's security needs -- I'd probably go with zeroing out the drive if concerned about drive life or one of the tools Joby mentioned for something more secure. But yes, for real security, physical destruction isn't odd. I recall the story of one of the people Phil Zimmerman was working with on PGP posted the initial code to the newsgroups and then took his computer drive out back and shot it.

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So, you're saying that if I have a 2GB drive with some info and I overwrite it with a 2GB file, someone could recover the initial info stored on that usb drive? I can't believe that! I think it's possible only if they're selling 4GB drives as being 2GB and found a way to avoid all system checking methods.
And I bet that data overwritten by Darik's Boot and Nuke for example (YES, it works on connected usb drives, too), can not be recovered in 100 years from now!
The researchers from the University of California said the methods tried failed because SOME data remained intact. What the hell would someone use 2KB of my 71KB KeePass database for? The information would be all corrupted and shit... I don't find the need to shoot my drives yet. But I'd like to take a shot at the person that tries to recover some of my data...

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Flash drives are overprovisioned (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write_amplification#Over-provisioning), i.e. contain more storage than is logically addressible. As a result, if you overwrite all logical sectors, the drive still contains remnants of the old data in blocks that you didn't overwrite.

If you install three operating systems into the same Flash drive, the drive keeps the last OS and some individual sectors from the second one.



Indeed, if you're not worried about an attacker getting a kilobyte or two, full disk wiping is secure, but sometimes way too slow. With four of the eight drives the researchers tested, overwriting the drive once with sequential data took 58 hours or more (140 hours with the slowest drive).

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http://hddguru.com/software/HDD-LLF-Low ... rmat-Tool/

This was just posted on Softpedia: http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/Har ... Tool.shtml




Great warning message:


Note: forgive me if I don't test this for portability!

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