Holepunch: Fast, Secure File Deletion with Crash Consistency
Zachary Ratliff, Wittmann Goh, Abe Wieland, James Mickens, Ryan Williams
IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2024 · Day 2 · Continental Ballroom 6
In the realm of digital security and privacy, the concept of "deletion" often carries a misleading connotation. Users and businesses alike frequently operate under the assumption that deleting a file renders it permanently irrecoverable, yet the reality in modern computing environments is far more complex. This talk by Zachary Ratliff and his co-authors introduces **Holepunch**, a novel system designed to achieve truly secure and fast file deletion with per-file granularity, while also ensuring crash consistency. The work addresses critical shortcomings in existing file deletion mechanisms, which often leave sensitive data vulnerable to recovery by adversaries even after an explicit delete command.
AI review
Holepunch presents a genuinely novel and robust solution for per-file secure deletion, leveraging puncturable pseudo random functions (PPRFs) to achieve cryptographic erasure with exceptional efficiency and crash consistency. This work addresses critical shortcomings in modern storage and prior methods, offering a practical, deployable system with significant implications for data privacy and regulatory compliance.