Secure deletion for NAND flash file system

Abstract

In most file systems, if a file is deleted, only the metadata of the file is deleted or modified and the file's data is still stored on the physical media. Some users require that deleted files no longer be accessible. This requirement is more important in embedded systems that employ flash memory as a storage medium. In this paper, we have designed a NAND flash file system that has a secure deletion functionality. We modified YAFFS to support secure deletion. Our method uses encryption to delete files and forces all keys of a specific file to be stored in the same block. Therefore, only one erase operation is required to securely delete a file. The proposed method securely deletes not only keys but also all of the metadata of that file. Our simulation results show that the number of block erases due to file creation and file modification is very low and the amortized number of block erases is lower than the simple encryption method. Even though we applied our method only to the YAFFS, our method can be easily applied to other NAND flash file systems. Copyright 2008 ACM.