How Safe is Safe with Artificial Intelligence?

How Safe is Safe? Advancements in Artificial Intelligence and Quantum Computing Might Render Today’s Data Deletion Methods Insufficient Tomorrow

The Good

When you encrypt data on a hard drive, it is converted into an unreadable format, usually requiring a decryption key to be accessed. Depending on the method, if that drive is later wiped, it may remove or overwrite the data to prevent recovery.

Encryption ensures that even if someone accesses the raw data, it is unintelligible without the correct key. Wiping typically involves overwriting the entire disk with random data, multiple times in some cases, to make previous data unrecoverable. This is often seen as the most secure way to prevent data recovery from old drives.

As of now, it appears that AI alone cannot recover data from an encrypted and wiped drive if the proper wiping techniques were applied. Here’s why:

• Encrypted Data: If data was encrypted using a strong algorithm (like AES-256), the encryption is virtually impossible to break without the decryption key. AI might assist in brute-forcing weak encryption or cracking poorly implemented security, but with modern, properly implemented encryption standards, even AI lacks the necessary computational power to break the encryption within a feasible time frame.

• Wiped Data: After a hard drive is securely wiped, AI would also struggle to recover the original data because the information has been physically overwritten. Even advanced machine learning algorithms wouldn't be able to recreate original data from completely randomized overwritten data.

Once data has been encrypted with a robust key or wiped using secure methods like multi-pass overwriting or degaussing, the chances of recovery—AI-assisted or otherwise—are incredibly slim. No current AI technology can reconstruct securely wiped and encrypted data.

The Bad

AI can assist in traditional data recovery in some ways, however:

• Pattern Recognition: AI is great at identifying patterns and anomalies in large datasets. In data recovery, this can mean AI may be able to identify fragments of unencrypted or incompletely wiped data and piece them together. However, this only applies if the drive wasn't thoroughly wiped.

• Forensic Recovery: AI tools are increasingly being used in digital forensics to detect traces of data and metadata left on disks. This is particularly effective when drives have been formatted but not securely wiped.

The Ugly

AI is already enhancing fields like cryptography and data analysis through its ability to:

• Analyze vast datasets and identify patterns that humans or traditional systems might miss.

• Crack weak encryption or poorly implemented security by quickly identifying flaws, such as improperly generated encryption keys or vulnerabilities in outdated algorithms.

The most significant threat to modern encryption might not come directly from AI, but from quantum computing. Quantum computers, once fully developed, could break certain encryption algorithms by efficiently solving problems that would take classical computers (and current AI models) millions of years to complete.

For instance, Shor’s algorithm could theoretically break RSA encryption by factoring large numbers quickly—a task that classical computers struggle with.

AI could also assist quantum computing by optimizing attack strategies, but quantum computing would be the main driver behind any major breakthroughs in breaking encryption, rather than AI alone.

Conclusion: Today’s data deletion techniques may not be sufficient tomorrow

Corporations and private individuals may feel that wiped and encrypted data is secured using top-of-the-line software. Today. But data deletion methods of today may be obsolete tomorrow, in particular with advancements in decryption, AI, and computational techniques

The only way to ensure that data is lost forever is to destroy the media upon which the data is written. NTERA can help you as an individual or as a corporation to ensure that data is never again recovered.

Image: Image by rawpixel.com on Freepik