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How to securely recycle or dispose of your SSD

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Re: How to securely recycle or dispose of your SSD

#71

Post by rdl »

masklinn wrote: post #48
rdl wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blending (specifically in a dedicated blender jar, not one you ever use for food) is the best way to destroy SD cards I've found, and apparently a major fruit company has done this in the past. It's also a solid excuse to buy a blendtec 800 with sound enclosure for the office -- way quieter than any shredder. And good for making drinks.

> It's also a solid excuse to buy a blendtec 800 with sound enclosure for the office -- way quieter than any shredder. And good for making drinks. Didn't you recommend against drinking electronics dust right at the start of the comment?

You use a different dedicated jar.

Re: How to securely recycle or dispose of your SSD

#72

Post by StavrosK »

andai wrote: post #65
StavrosK wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your Bitcoin wallet is on your hard drive, recovery after overwrite is the least of your worries.

Where is yours? Hardcopy?

For the everyday coins (which I never use), my phone. For the savings (which I don't have), hardware wallet. The Ledger Nano S is great, I have one, but the HW1 is also very good and very very cheap.

Re: How to securely recycle or dispose of your SSD

#73

Post by theandrewbailey »

koliber wrote: post #40

Can someone explain to me how doing a low-level write of all zeroes to the disk is not effective, but rewriting the data in encrypted form is effective? Let's say I have a 100Gb SSD disc and it contains 25Gb of files. If I read in my unencrypted files, encrypt them and write them back to the SSD, they won't necessarily end up in the same physical place as the unencrypted files. Won't the unencrypted files still be th…

The idea is to always use your drive with encryption from the start, so that no "plaintext" data is ever written, ever. When your physical garbage collection happens, rekey or reformat.

Depending on the drive, this is pretty easy. TCG OPAL drives are required to write encrypted data to the media 100% of the time. Seems that you can rekey the drive easily:

https://github.com/Drive-Trust-Alliance/sedutil/wiki/PSID-Re...

Re: How to securely recycle or dispose of your SSD

#74

Post by tinus_hn »

koliber wrote: post #40

Can someone explain to me how doing a low-level write of all zeroes to the disk is not effective, but rewriting the data in encrypted form is effective? Let's say I have a 100Gb SSD disc and it contains 25Gb of files. If I read in my unencrypted files, encrypt them and write them back to the SSD, they won't necessarily end up in the same physical place as the unencrypted files. Won't the unencrypted files still be th…

An SSD, like a SD card is actually a computer that accesses a large amount of unreliable storage and presents it as a smaller amount of reliable storage.

It is impossible to reason about the way the storage actually works because it is completely invisible.

If you write a large amount of zeroes, the disk may well only write one sector of zeroes and use some index to show it all over the disk. You'll never know.

If there is a bug in the firmware or someone uploads a different firmware to the controller, it might be possible to retrieve the data you thought was overwritten.

The only way to be sure that the data cannot be retrieved is by encrypting it with a key that is stored in a place where it can be removed.

Re: How to securely recycle or dispose of your SSD

#75

Post by 3pt14159 »

raverbashing wrote: post #70
3pt14159 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bitcoin wallet is not top-secret material and I don't trust myself not to fuck up overwriting the entire disk. I'd rather just take an angle grinder to it and not worry about it.

If your btc wallet is left unencrypted in your hard drive, either spinning or ssd, you have bigger problems than someone rummaging for your used hardware

To be fair, this is on a computer I haven't turned on in years, before hardware wallets were a thing.

Re: How to securely recycle or dispose of your SSD

#76

Post by coretx »

londons_explore wrote: post #53
coretx wrote: post #47

Ha! I've been trashing HDD's and USB sticks using old microwave ovens for decennia now. It's so simple. Remove the cover, place the ssd in the middle of the oven and blast your data. Ultra cheap, ultra secure. ( But do take personal security precautions )

hdds act as a big metal faraday cage, and the actual magnetic media will probably survive. USB sticks the actual flash memory chips have input protection diodes and are quite physically small (limiting the voltage across them), so again I wouldn't be surprised if they survived.

Yes, that's why I wrote that you need to remove the _cover_. Regarding flash memory chips the real worry is to not blast them for too much time, not if the data is purged.

Re: How to securely recycle or dispose of your SSD

#77

Post by pasbesoin »

Pertaining to this, here are some basic questions I had a hard time finding straightforward answers to, when I last considered built-in SSD encryption a couple of years ago.

- Are the AES keys unique per device?

- Any guarantee that the manufacturer is not keeping a record of serial numbers / AES keys going out the door? (Assuming sealed manufacturer packaging and trust in same when buying.)

- There are some instructions for resetting an AES key after installation. How do I reset an SSD's AES key before installation? Can and how do I use the manufacturer's utility or other means to do so when it is e.g. plugged into an extant system via USB?

- Exact descriptions of how the firmware interacts with BIOS (or UFI, I suppose).

At the moment, I'm trusting to whole-disk software encryption. Not that I have anything particularly concerning to hide (less than most, probably). I considered using the SSD firmware encryption, but I wore out on chasing down such details. Maybe things have improved in this regard, in the meantime, but a few years ago, I didn't manage to chase down clear descriptions and instructions for these things.

Re: How to securely recycle or dispose of your SSD

#78

Post by raverbashing »

3pt14159 wrote: post #75
raverbashing wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your btc wallet is left unencrypted in your hard drive, either spinning or ssd, you have bigger problems than someone rummaging for your used hardware

To be fair, this is on a computer I haven't turned on in years, before hardware wallets were a thing.

Ah just sledgehammer the drive then

Re: How to securely recycle or dispose of your SSD

#79

Post by rwmj »

andai wrote: post #67
rwmj wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I immerse my old HDDs and SSDs in full sugar Coke.

I know you're probably joking, but would this actually work? I know it dissolves teeth.

I'm not joking! Full sugar soda is cheap and readily available, it's acidic and it does appear to damage the electronics. In theory at least the sugar should also gum up the innards of HDDs.
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