I was reading through this very interesting thread on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2n02lt/iama_data_recovery_engineer_i_get_files_from/ This statement by the engineer was kinda shocking: "Most exciting innovations are SSDs. Upcoming technology will allow us to recover SSDs that have been completely overwritten with zeros, or wiped." Will this be really possible? I mean recovering data from SSD even if wiped properly?
Reading that thread, one take-home is that overwriting isn't the best way to wipe SSDs. The best way is using FDE, and then forgetting the passphrase.
If I really wanted to destroy data that's on a disk, I would probably just destroy that drive. If I wanted to retain a drive I would encrypt the drive (using longest possible passphrase that I would not remember) and then overwrite it with zeros.
Data is only recoverable if the data was never truly deleted in the first place and this applies to any binary logic based storage device.
Yes, that's true. The problem is in the knowing Say that I have an SSD that's full-disk encrypted (dm-crypt/LUKS). What could I do to trigger leaving plaintext visible after encrypting and unmounting? Would hard rebooting do it? But it might also kill the SSD, or so I've read. I could use tools discussed on https://www.wilderssecurity.com/forums/encryption-problems.134/ to search the disk for plaintext, right? But what about areas that have been swapped out in the process of wear leveling? Are there tools for reading those storage areas?
That is the risk of storing unencrypted data on ANY drive (the issue bigger with SSD than HDD though). The best you can do use encryption from new.