patent of the day

[Florian Weimer]

* Saqib Ali:

> can anyone please shed more light on this patent. It seems like a
> patent on the simple process of cryptographic erase......

Exactly.  Niels Provos, "Encrypting Virtual Memory", USENIX Security
2000, looks like something pretty close to prior art:

| We investigate several alternative solutions to prevent confidential
| data from remaining on backing store, e.g. erasing data physically
| from the backing store after pages on it become unreferenced.
| However, we find that encryption of data on the backing store with
| volatile random keys has several advantages over other approaches:
| 
| * The content of a page disappears when its respective encryption key
|   is deleted, a very fast operation. [...]

AFAICS, the patent does not reference the paper.

-- 
Florian Weimer                <fweimer at bfk.de>
BFK edv-consulting GmbH       http://www.bfk.de/
Kriegsstraße 100              tel: +49-721-96201-1
D-76133 Karlsruhe             fax: +49-721-96201-99

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