Secure deletion of confidential data in consumer electronics

Abstract

This paper presents an efficient secure deletion scheme for Flash memory storage like USB memory. First, we identify two data destruction techniques, namely, zero overwriting and block cleaning, and their cost-benefit models on Flash memory storage. Then, we propose a hybrid scheme that applies one of them based on their costs that vary with data arrangement on Flash memory. Our implementation and experiments show that the proposed hybrid scheme improves confidentiality of sensitive data with low overheads. ©2008 IEEE.