ITRenew Said to Prevail in Patent Non-Infringement Lawsuit Vs. Blancco

ITRenew, Inc. announced that its patent non-infringement lawsuit brought against Blancco Technology Group has been dismissed.

Blancco had been court-ordered to file infringement claim by March 2, 2017, which would have required the company to produce actual evidence of infringement. Blancco instead filed stipulation for voluntary dismissal after two separate examinations of ITRenew’s Teraware by a third-party digital forensics expert found no evidence of infringement of a Blancco patent covering a particular method for erasing data from SSDs.

“It is extremely unusual in such cases that a countersuit asserting actual infringement is not filed, which speaks clearly to the irresponsible allegations made by Blancco,” said Aidin Aghamiri, VP, corporate strategy, ITRenew. “By filing the voluntary dismissal, Blancco effectively retracts its unfounded allegations, but that’s not what the company will lead the public to believe.“

With no good faith basis to assert counterclaims, Blancco contends in a press release that Teraware uses compressible data, and any system that uses data compression is a security liability. According to Matt Mickelson, director, product management, ITRenew, who was closely involved in technical analysis of the patent claims, Blancco’s position is both inaccurate and misleading.

“ITRenew does not subscribe to the hype of telling customers an uncompressible data overwrite will eliminate the risk of data breach, as it fails to do so for flash-based storage,” said Mikelson, chief architect, Teraware’s SSD sanitization scheme. “After careful review of the Blancco patent in question, it was immediately understood that the patented process does in fact allow for a degree of compression. It furthermore executes a firmware erasure command, which would not be necessary if the technique of overwriting uncompressed data were sufficient and absolute.“

Mickelson further addresses the issue of compressible data in the blog post Three Vulnerabilities of SSD Data Sanitization.

“Innovation is core to everything we do, and begins with the realization there’s a better way to do things,” said Aghamiri. “Just because we developed a better process does not mean we infringed a patent. Just because we’re not tied to 20-year-old thinking does not mean our process is vulnerable. The certifications we’ve achieved, and the customer base we’ve established, validate Teraware among true experts in the field, and on the ability to perform in the most technologically-demanding IT environments. Our clients operate the most hyperscaled data centers in the world and cannot afford to take weeks to erase data onsite, only for that process to fail half the time. We had to build a better mousetrap, and we did.“

In October 2014, ITRenew’s Teraware became the first software forensically-certified to erase SSDs when an ADISA Product Claim Test of Teraware showed that data was not retrievable by a Test Level 2 forensic attack. ADISA, an accreditation body for the ITAD industry, tested several other erasure tools, including Blancco’s. More than two years later, Teraware remains the only data erasure solution to have passed Risk Levels 1, 2, 3 and 4 (High) and Test Levels 1 and 2 for the forensic-level sanitization of SSDs.

According to Mickelson, ITRenew is currently engaged in the largest independent forensic-analysis study of data sanitization technology. “We’re confident the certified results will further distance Teraware from other erasure software for enterprise-grade data sanitization.“

Additional information on the patent non-infringement lawsuit (5:16-cv-03221) filed against Blancco in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.