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Protecting Sensitive Data: Researchers Develop Fail-Safe Techniques for Erasing Magnetic Storage |
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Source: Georgia Tech Research - Posted by Eric Lubow
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After a U.S. intelligence-gathering aircraft was involved in a mid-air collision off the coast of China four years ago, the crew was unable to erase sensitive information from magnetic data storage systems before making an emergency landing in Chinese territory. That event underscored the need for simple techniques to provide fail-safe destruction of sensitive data aboard such aircraft. Working with defense contractor L-3 Communications Corp., scientists at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) have developed a series of prototype systems that use special high-strength permanent magnets to quickly erase a wide variety of storage media.
Developed so far for VHS tapes, floppy drives, data cassettes, and small computer hard drives, the techniques could also have commercial applications for banking, human resource and other industries that must also protect sensitive information. “This is a very challenging problem,� said Michael Knotts, a research scientist in the GTRI’s Signature Technology Laboratory. “We had to verify that the data would be beyond all possible recovery even with unlimited budget and unlimited time. Commercial devices on the market for data erasure just couldn’t fill the bill, because they were magnetically too weak, they were physically too large and heavy, or they didn’t meet stringent air safety standards.�
Read this full article at Georgia Tech Research
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