Lexicon · term
Cryptographic erasure
Also called Crypto-shredding, Cryptographic erase, Key destruction.
Holding personal content in a permanent record only as ciphertext under a per-person key kept somewhere else, so erasure is performed by destroying the key rather than by editing the record. The ordering, the hashes, and the replayability survive; the personal content does not. Recognized in NIST SP 800-88 Revision 1 as cryptographic erase. Two conditions travel with it and belong in any honest statement of the promise: the guarantee is exactly as strong as the key management underneath, and unrecoverability is a claim about the present state of cryptanalysis rather than a law of nature.