Blancco Files Stipulation for Voluntary Dismissal

Blancco Technology Group, provider of mobile device diagnostics and secure data erasure solutions, announced that it has filed voluntary stipulation of dismissal without prejudice in the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California for declaratory judgment litigation brought by ITRenew, Inc.

ITRenew’s litigation had sought a judicial declaration that it had not infringed Blancco Technology Group’s U.S. Patent No. 9,286,231, Apparatus, a system, a method and a computer program for erasing data stored on a storage device.

Since ITRenew filed for a declaratory judgment of non-infringement, Blancco has engaged in litigation to protect its IP and the method by which Drive Eraser (formerly Blancco 5) erases data from SSDs. Central to Drive Eraser’s approach is the use of uncompressible data, which is permanently erasable. ITRenew has claimed that its Teraware product does not obtain a sequence of uncompressible data in its data erasure operations, but rather uses a fixed (or static) overwrite pattern similar to what is typically used on rotating magnetic drives.

To reach a suitable outcome for both parties, a third-party digital forensics expert was brought on to determine if Teraware product uses uncompressible data in its data erasure operations. In two different examinations by a digital forensics expert, no evidence of uncompressible data was found.

Data from Markets and Markets indicates that the global SSD market is poised for rapid growth and expected to be worth $230 billion by 2022. And data compression is now prevalent across hardware and firmware in storage devices, including SSDs. This is due in large part to its benefits of improved data transfer and optimized capacity.

“As data erasure experts with almost 20 years of experience serving enterprise businesses around the world, our opinion is that executing data erasure commands using compressible data on any system that uses data compression is a security vulnerability and could potentially leave data remnants on storage devices,” said Khalid Elibiary, VP of Technology, Blancco.