International Business Machines Corporation

Tim Waizenegger

Cataldo Mega

David Lebutsch

Michael Edward Factor

Alexandra Shulman-Peleg

Jonathan M Barney

Stefan Schleipen

Daivid Lebutsch

Bernhard Kurtz

A computing facility, including a storage management system belonging to a first trust zone having a first privilege level, a metadata management system belonging to a second trust zone having a second privilege level higher than the first privilege level, and a security management system belonging to a third trust zone having a third privilege level higher than or equal to the second privilege level. The storage management system is and configured to store multiple content entities, and the metadata management system is configured to manage, for each of the multiple content entities, metadata including a respective content encryption key and a respective retention time, each of the content entities being encrypted by its respective content encryption key. The security management system is configured to manage a master encryption key used to create the respective content encryption keys, and to confirm expiration of the respective retention times.

Retention management in a facility with multiple trust zones and encryption based secure deletion

Embodiments relate to digital data retention management. An aspect includes calculating a retention date associated with a data object in a storage system. Another aspect includes generating a cryptographic checksum for metadata relating to said data object, the metadata comprising the retention date. Another aspect includes storing said metadata and said cryptographic checksum. Another aspect includes, based on receiving a request to perform a deletion transaction on said data object for deleting said data object from the storage system: verifying metadata validity by checking the cryptographic checksum for the metadata associated with said data object to detect possible tampering of the metadata; verifying retention expiration by determining that a current date is past the retention date comprised in said metadata; and based on successful verification of metadata validity and retention expiration, authorizing deletion of said data object by the storage system.

Digital data retention management

A data processing and storage apparatus has a hardware security module and a data storage medium storing encrypted data objects and a hierarchical data maintenance structure of encrypted partition tables and hash-nodes forming a rooted tree, where a given partition table comprises a first reference to a given encrypted data object and a first cryptographic key for decryption thereof, where a given hash-node comprises a second reference to a partition tables or hash-node and a second cryptographic key being suitable for decryption thereof, and where the root node is decipherable using a master cryptographic key stored in the hardware security module, the given data object being assigned to the root node via the first and second references of the given partition table and the given hash-nodes forming a set of successive nodes in the rooted tree.

Deletion of content in digital storage systems

Growing community of inventors

Stuttgart, Germany

Tim Waizenegger