Standards and Techniques to remove Data Remanence in Cloud Storage

Abstract

Data security is one of the main concerns for organizations when organizations deploy cloud to store data. Particularly, data leakage is a critical issue in public clouds due to data remanence. The retentive property of storage media is observed as a major threat because it may include sensitive information such as user id, user passwords, secret keys, web URLs, etc. Healthcare records, financial records, defense records are some of the examples where data remanence has serious repercussions. Though consumers vacate cloud volumes, vendors do not securely recycle storage devices. Hence, cold boot attack, harvesting attacks, side-channel attacks are likely to occur in the cloud. It is required to ensure about data integrity and confidentiality of sensitive data within a cloud by organizations or users. It is observed that encryption and data persistence avoidance technology for different memory devices like Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Static and/or Dynamic Random-Access Memory (SDRAM) are widely used. In this paper, we discuss and provide various standards and techniques proposed in the literature to remove the data remanence in the cloud storage. Moreover, we present a comparison of parametric evaluation of overwriting standards to remove data remanence.