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CISSP study material · question 155 of 500

An administrator overwrites every user-addressable block of a solid-state drive and reports it sanitized. Why does NIST SP 800-88 treat this as unreliable?

  1. Spare cells and wear levelling mean ordinary read and write commands cannot reach every location that held data.
  2. The overwrite pattern must be repeated at least three times to be effective.
  3. Overwriting is only valid where the drive is encrypted at rest.
  4. Solid-state drives report block addresses in a different order after each write.
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Answer: A. Spare cells and wear levelling mean ordinary read and write commands cannot reach every location that held data.

Flash devices contain spare cells and perform wear levelling, so a user cannot address every area that previously held sensitive data through the native read and write interface.

Source: NIST SP 800-88 Rev. 2 (NIST) — SP 800-88 Rev. 2 > 3.1.1 Clear Sanitization Method

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