SHRED SIZE VALIDATION with VIZION

Where physical destruction of storage media is concerned, shredding is one of the most used techniques. The speed at which storage media is rendered inoperable is one of the attractions to this process, with only laboratory based data recovery techniques being viable to recover data.

The techniques which could be applied to shredded material are typically:

• Platter level recovery using Magnetic Force Microscopy.
• Decapsulation on shredded NAND cells.
• Chip readers for intact NAND cells post shred.

Countermeasures to these techniques are typically to specify a shred size which renders these types of attack unfeasible. Due to the nature of the storage media, there are different size expectations for the size of the particles which are the output from a shredding process based on the ability to recover data.

There are standards which specify the size of shredded material including ISO / IEC 21964 which specifies a particle size by media type and security level.

Vizion is a blend of high-resolution imagery using a light box and camera followed by an analysis process using proprietary software which is able to measure the two longest lengths of the particle size and compute the surface area. Even for irregular shapes, the software is able to accurately identify the particle area.