Patent attributes
Technologies are provided for secure sanitization of a storage device. A storage device can be configured to support an operational mode, into which the storage device is placed by default, and in which requests to cryptographically erase the storage device are rejected. The storage device can support a separate sanitization mode in which a request to cryptographically erase the storage device will be processed. Access to the sanitization mode can be restricted to trusted sources (such as a boot firmware of a computer connected to the storage device). The storage device can be configured to reject a command to place the storage device in the sanitization mode, unless the command is received during an initialization of the storage device. In at least some embodiments, the storage device can reject data access commands while it is in the sanitization mode.
