[Cryptography] LUKS on ATA versus on SSD

[Douglas Lucas]

For a nomadic freelance journalist, does it matter whether I deploy LUKS
for drive encryption on an ATA drive or on an SSD drive? In other words,
is ATA better for encryption because it's less complicated than SSD and
therefore there are fewer things to screw up. An engineer once
(oversimplifying) told me ATA just stores 1s and 0s, and therefore
encrypting it with LUKS is straightforward, but SSD does a lot of
remapping/algorithms/probabilities to try to speed things up, thus
opening up a greater surface area of vulnerability. But maybe this
engineer was just shooting his mouth off, I wouldn't know.

Also, ChatGPT claimed the below, but I'm not sure what or how much it
means regarding plausible deniability setups or ATA vs SSD security
under LUKS:
===
Encryption + Wear Leveling

SSDs already do internal wear leveling and block remapping. LUKS just
encrypts blocks and passes them to the device. SSD firmware handles the
rest. There’s no documented security issue caused by combining SSD wear
leveling with LUKS.

🪣 TRIM/Discard Support

SSDs can use TRIM/discard to improve performance and longevity.

You can enable LUKS to forward discard commands to the SSD securely.

This is an operational choice (and sometimes debated for plausible
deniability), not a fundamental flaw in LUKS or SSDs.
===

Thanks,

Douglas