I think this has been discussed before, but I want to bring it up again since I saw this tonight:

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/01/...-mdash-Or-Else

Needless to say the vast majority of the discussion is iOS or Android, but what about us? We have more power over our devices than they do, so what can we do to make our devices REALLY secure?

Or can we? Being that we're talking about flash memory here, I have some concerns about leftover data still being in there even after being "deleted". I'm not talking about a filesystem delete where it just flags a bunch of inodes as unused, I'm talking about where even if you do a supposed low-level wipe that wear-levelling and such will still preserve the data, unlike on a disk.

So to summarize, I'm fully aware (as should all of you be) that security is always layered. The way I see it, the layers are:

1. App level: how do you make sure that, once you save them, app data from texts and the web browser are wiped?

2. System Password level: it seems to me you can overcome an installed password just by accessing the eMMC in mass storage mode, just like you would with any other drive--you don't even need special forensic tools. Is it worth even setting a password just to defeat n00b thieves and the curious?

3. Full Disk Encryption: the ultimate achievable level, IMHO, but subject to the flash limitations I said above. If that can be overcome, it seems it ought to be trivial to use whole-disk encryption. Has anyone done it? Has anyohe done it on Android?

Thanks, Mike