International Journal of Science, Engineering and TechnologyAuthors: Kahadane Shruti Sandip, Professor Bangar Abhishek P., Professor Bhosale Sachin B., Professor Karad Vandana A.
Abstract: Enterprises, schools and households retire large volumes of laptops, servers, phones and storage devices each year, and the recycling or resale of these assets is only trustworthy if the data they held can no longer be recovered. Failures are rarely cryptographic; they are procedural and technical: hidden storage areas are skipped, flash translation layers retain stale copies, wiping is not verified, and no auditable evidence is produced. A structured, PRISMA-informed narrative review was carried out covering standards (NIST SP 800-88 Rev. 1, IEEE 2883-2022), empirical studies of disk sanitization, flash and SSD erasure research, cryptographic erase, and the assured-deletion literature for cloud and IoT storage, including the recent Efficient and Verifiable Scheme for Secure Data Deletion (EVSD) [20] as a related primary study. The evidence shows that (i) single-file overwriting is unreliable on flash media, (ii) device-level sanitize commands and cryptographic erase are the preferred techniques for modern drives but depend on firmware correctness, (iii) verification is the weakest link in practice, and (iv) cryptographic assured-deletion schemes offer verifiable proofs but prove only limited properties and have not been evaluated for physical asset recycling. The review contributes (i) a media-to-method evidence table, (ii) a comparative analysis separating asset-recycling evidence from cloud-deletion evidence, (iii) an eight-layer conceptual architecture for verifiable, auditable data wiping with a gated validation loop, (iv) a leakage-resistant evaluation protocol, and (v) a prioritised research agenda. The architecture is conceptual and has not been implemented or experimentally validated.
