FORTASA BLOG

US Army Infomation Systems Manual

Practically every government organization has defined it's own requirement for secure and untraceable data removal.   One of the such data sanitization methods used to securely purge all stored data from the Flash storage device is a USA-Army 380-19 requirement. Defined in the in Army Regulation 380-19, published by the US Army this method mandates the destructive sequence below to overwrite existing information on a hard drive, SSD, Flash card or other storage device.

The USA-Army 380-19 data sanitization method is defined to be implemented in the following way:

• Pass 1: Erase the whole address space of the SSD
• Pass 2: Fill the whole disk address space with random data.
• Pass 3: Fill the whole disk address space with specific character pattern 0x55.
• Pass 4: Fill the whole disk address space with specific character pattern 0xAA.

The USA-Army 380-19 data sanitization method is oftentimes used by various data destruction programs and it could be implemented without a final pass verification or without a third pass altogether.

Erasing and re-writing a Solid State Drive using the USA-Army 380-19 data sanitization method will prevent all software and hardware based file recovery methods from re-creating previously stored information from the drive.

Most data destruction implementations support multiple data sanitization methods in addition to USA-Army 380-19.

Please contact Fortasa to discuss your security requirements in your Solid State Storage needs.