A fast algorithm for data erasure

As digital resources increasingly growing and the economic benefit of digital intellectual property rights being increasingly important, people has been increasingly emphasis on information security issues brought by the data remnants in storage devices. They try their best to prevent the potential risks. In this paper, we survey comprehensively related technologies, standards and trends of erasure, discuss the shortcomings of techniques on adding secure deletion to file systems and on cryptographic to prevent deleted data from being accessible. We focus on secure deletion mechanism in the NTFS file system, combining the asynchronous I/O multi-threading technology. Finally we present a novel data erasing algorithm, Quick Erase, which not only greatly exceeds the speed of the existing international data erasing algorithms but also can be easily combined with a variety of standard algorithms to form various high-speed mixed erase algorithms. It can be used to erase file data and metadata to ensure the security and reliability of data erasing. The test result of Quick Erase indicates that the erasure speed of one big file has reached 10-12 s/100 MB, faster than that of existing secure deletion tools (60-80 s/100 MB). The algorithm has good application prospects for practical applications.