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How safe is sensitive magnetic data once it’s been deleted?
If you are discarding a hard drive that once stored sensitive data, make
sure you take the necessary precautions to render recovery as difficult as
possible. Analyzing the inherent problems with trying to erase data will
yield a better understanding of the precautions necessary to mitigate
potential unauthorized access.
The Peter
Gutmann paper "Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State
Memory" and in-depth paper on "Data
Remanence in Semiconductor Devices" provides a comprehensive review.
IEEE Security & Privacy - Remembrance of Data Passed: A Study of Disk
Sanitization Practices.
MIT NEWS: researchers uncover mountains of private data on discarded
computers.
Eraser is an
advanced security tool for Windows and the patterns used for overwriting are
based on Peter Guttmann's article.
DBAN is a
self-contained boot floppy that securely wipes hard disks.
DoD
5200.28-STD – Department of Defense Trusted Computer System Evaluation
Criteria.
A Disk and File Shredders
Comparison
DiskTrend
offers a wealth of information on optical or magnetic disk and maintains a
good link section to storage industry web pages.
The MDHC
Magnetic Disk Heritage Center is a tribute to the first random access disk
product, the IBM RAMAC 350.
The future of Data Storage Technology remains ambiguous; however, the
following learned sources offer their perspective on imminent storage
mediums.
The WTEC
Panel Report on The Future of Data Storage Technologies.
IBM Think Research on
Storage
The future of
magnetic data storage technology by D. A. Thompson and J. S. Best.
In this paper, they review the evolutionary path of magnetic data storage
and examine the physical phenomena that will prevent us from continuing the
use of those scaling processes which have served us in the past. It is
concluded that the first problem will arise from the storage medium, whose
grain size cannot be scaled much below a diameter of ten nanometers without
thermal self-erasure. Other problems will involve head-to-disk spacings that
approach atomic dimensions, and switching-speed limitations in the head and
medium. It is likely that the rate of progress in areal density will
decrease substantially as we develop drives with ten to a hundred times
current areal densities.
Physicsweb article Nano-boost for data storage.
Data storage capacity could be increased a thousand-fold following research
carried out by materials scientists in the US. Harsh Deep Chopra and Susan
Hua of the State University of New York at Buffalo observed ballistic
magnetoresistance of over 3000% in nickel contacts just a few atoms long.
MIT Technology Review Magnetic Future Innovation By Erika Jonietz,
Isolating bits on a disk drive could shatter storage limits.
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