Hi, I'm the author of the first reference cited by this article, and the coiner of the term 'self-corrosion' for this phenomenon. First of all, thank you to th

Hi, I'm the author of the first reference cited by this article, and the coiner of the term 'self-corrosion' for this phenomenon. First of all, thank you to the author of the headline article for their interesting article and for citing our research. I'd say our main findings were a little bit different to what is described in the article, though I'd agree with most of what was written there. We discovered that SSD drives can wipe themselves (with their own GC) even in the absence of TRIM commands and despite the use of forensic write-blockers that block both writes and trims being sent on the ATA/SATA bus. To my mind, that's what is really shocking - you get this phenomenon even when the very best forensic tools are used and even on OS's that aren't using TRIM. (My coauthor was a professional forensic investigator armed with professional equipment). For example, imagine if you had some data on your disk that was fragmented all over the disk. If the disk has a garbage collector that wants to consolidate flash sectors so it can erase the leftover space after consolidation (e.g. to improve performance), then you're going to get deleted data being purged without any TRIM command being involved after the consolidate/erase operation. If I remember right (it's been a few years), some firmwares also detect fast-formatting operations in OS's that don't support TRIM and use that as a clue to trigger automatic GC. That was the really stunning one for us. A fast format by the user led to the disk wiping itself just minutes later under forensic conditions. Of course this sounds great for privacy, self-wiping and so on, but the problem is that it could look like this accidental wiping was an intentional attempt to destroy evidence (e.g. manual wipe, logic bomb or something). That's where things get tricky. It looks like the link isn't working, here's a working link: http://graemebell.net/publications//upload/bellbodd2010-preprint.pdf http://graemebell.net/publications//upload/bellbodd2010-prep... or http://researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/3714/1/solid_state_drives.pdf http://researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/3714/1/solid_state_... That paper was written for any educated person to understand, not just forensic experts, so I hope you enjoy it if you do take a look. We talk about both the technical and legal side of things in the paper. Thanks for reading, and I'll check in on this comment later in case anyone has questions.