Universal Encoding for Provably Irreversible Data Erasing
Marek Klonowski, Tomasz Strumiński, Małgorzata Sulkowska · 2019
One of the most important assumptions in computer security research is that one can permanently delete some data in such a way that no party can retrieve it. In real-life systems this postulate is realized dependently on the specific device used for storing data. In some cases (e.g., magnetic discs) the deletion/erasing is done by overwriting the data to be erased by new one. Many evidence suggest that such procedure may be not sufficient and the attacker armed with advanced microscopic technology is capable in many cases of retrieving data overwritten even many times. In this paper we present a method that provides provable, permanent and irreversible deletion of stored bits based solely on special encoding and processing of data. More precisely the adversary learns nothing about deleted data whp. The security guarantees hold even if the attacker is capable of getting bit-strings overwritten many times. Moreover, in contrast to some previous research, we do not restrict type of data to be deleted.