What does crypto erase involve in terms of data sanitization, making the recovery of data effectively impossible?

Crypto erase in the context of data sanitization involves ensuring that the encryption keys used to encrypt sensitive data are securely destroyed, making it impossible to recover the original data. When the keys are sanitized or erased, the data itself remains on the storage medium, but without the keys, it cannot be decrypted or accessed meaningfully, as the original plaintext cannot be retrieved without the keys.

This approach is particularly effective because it does not require extensive hardware manipulation or rewriting of data, which can be time-consuming and may not guarantee complete data removal. Instead, by simply sanitizing the keys, it renders the encrypted data useless.

In contrast, other options involve practices that do not inherently secure the data in the same way. For example, setting up a new file system or rewriting file data may reorganize data but doesn't ensure that the original data cannot be recovered. Overwriting data multiple times is a method of sanitization known as data wiping, but it is more resource-intensive and does not focus on the key management aspect that crypto erase addresses directly.