Patent No. 6,993,661 – System and Method that Provides for the Efficient and Effective Sanitizing of Disk Storage Units and the Like

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Patent Summary:

Maintaining the security of data stored on disk storage units is a long recognized problem. Typically, when files are deleted on disks, the underlying data is not erased, but file data detailing the locations of the data is deleted from tables. The underlying data can thus be recovered using any number of conventional techniques.

Other disk sanitization techniques have been tried, including overwriting the stored data, but these techniques present their own problems, since overwriting is time consuming and often leaves recoverable remnants of the original data.

The invention of the ‘661 patent solves these problems by encrypting the entirety of the information as it is stored on the disk and decrypting the information upon retrieval. If the disk is to be sanitized, the key or keys used to encrypt/decrypt the data are discarded or made unavailable.