Efficient Proofs of Secure Erasure

A proof of secure erasure (PoSE) enables a space restricted prover to convince a verifier that he has erased his memory of size S. So far the only known PoSEs have linear communication complexity in S or quadratic computation complexity in S, hence their applicability is limited, since Θ(S) communication or Θ(S 2) computation can be quite impractical (e.g., for devices with S memory words when S is in the order of GB’s). In this work we put forth two new PoSEs that for the first time achieve sublinear communication and quasilinear computation complexity hence they are more efficient than what was previously known. Efficiency comes at the price of slightly more relaxed security guarantees that we describe and motivate.