Visible to the public Facilitating the Efficiency of Secure File Data and Metadata Deletion on SMR-based Ext4 File System

TitleFacilitating the Efficiency of Secure File Data and Metadata Deletion on SMR-based Ext4 File System
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2021
AuthorsChen, Ping-Xiang, Chen, Shuo-Han, Chang, Yuan-Hao, Liang, Yu-Pei, Shih, Wei-Kuan
Conference Name2021 26th Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference (ASP-DAC)
Date Publishedjan
Keywordsdata deletion, design automation, ext4, File systems, Layout, metadata, performance evaluation, privacy, pubcrawl, Resource management, Scalability, secure deletion, shingled magnetic recording
AbstractThe efficiency of secure deletion is highly dependent on the data layout of underlying storage devices. In particular, owing to the sequential-write constraint of the emerging Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) technology, an improper data layout could lead to serious write amplification and hinder the performance of secure deletion. The performance degradation of secure deletion on SMR drives is further aggravated with the need to securely erase the file system metadata of deleted files due to the small-size nature of file system metadata. Such an observation motivates us to propose a secure-deletion and SMR-aware space allocation (SSSA) strategy to facilitate the process of securely erasing both the deleted files and their metadata simultaneously. The proposed strategy is integrated within the widely-used extended file system 4 (ext4) and is evaluated through a series of experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy. The evaluation results show that the proposed strategy can reduce the secure deletion latency by 91.3% on average when compared with naive SMR-based ext4 file system.
Citation Keychen_facilitating_2021