R&D: File-Oriented Fast Secure Deletion Strategy for SMR Drives

IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems has published an article written by Shuo-Han Chen, Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taipei University of Technology, Taipei, Taiwan, Chun-Feng Wu, Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan, Ming-Chang Yang, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, and Yuan-Hao Chang, Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan.

Abstract: “Nowadays, securely erasing deleted files has become one of the necessary tasks for users who want to protect their deleted data from malicious attackers. Nevertheless, existing secure deletion approaches are considered inefficient for erasing deleted files permanently because the file systems and storage devices do not share their file information or data layout with each other. On the emerging shingled magnetic recording (SMR) drives, the inefficiency of existing secure deletion approaches is exaggerated by the inherent sequential-write constraint of the high storage density SMR technology. On SMR drives, tracks are overlapped via utilizing the size difference between disk read/write heads to increase the storage density. Due to the overlapped track layout, secure deletion requests may induce a significant amount of write amplification and serious performance degradation if the data layout is not properly configured. Such observation motivates this paper to come up with a file-oriented fast secure deletion (FFSD) strategy to deal with the sequential-write constraint of SMR drives and improve the efficiency of secure deletion operations on SMR drives. The experimental results show that the proposed strategy can effectively reduce the secure deletion latency by 286.15x on average when compared with the conventional approach.“