Standards Alignment

Standards Alignment

AAD-50 is designed to meet or exceed the requirements of the following standards and specifications. This page documents how each standard maps to the AAD-50 protocol architecture.

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NIST SP 800-88 Rev.2 — Guidelines for Media Sanitization

Published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The current authoritative US government standard for media sanitization.

NIST SP 800-88 Rev.2 defines three sanitization categories:

Category	Definition	AAD-50 Alignment
Clear	Logical techniques to sanitize data in user-addressable storage locations	Not applicable — AAD-50 operates at firmware level
Purge	Physical or logical techniques that render Target Data recovery infeasible	Yes — AAD-50 Phase B+C achieve Purge classification
Destroy	Physical destruction of the storage device	Not applicable — AAD-50 is a software/firmware protocol

AAD-50 targets NIST SP 800-88 Rev.2 Purge classification through:

• NVMe Sanitize commands that reach all physical locations including over-provisioned zones, bad-block retirement pools, and wear-levelling reserves invisible to the host OS
• Per-cycle Log Page 0x81 hardware confirmation ensuring each cycle actually completed
• SHA-256 tamper-evident audit chain providing the documentation NIST requires for verified sanitization
• PDF Certificate of Destruction with operator name, drive serial number, and completion confirmation

Note: Formal NIST evaluation has not yet been conducted. Alignment is based on protocol design analysis against the Rev.2 specification published September 2025.

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NVMe Base Specification 2.0 / 2.1 — Sanitize Command Set

Published by NVM Express, Inc. The authoritative technical specification for NVMe Sanitize command behaviour.

AAD-50 implements the NVMe Sanitize command set as follows:

NVMe Feature	AAD-50 Implementation
Opcode 0x84	Used for all sanitize cycles across all three phases
NSID = 0xFFFFFFFF	Broadcast to entire drive subsystem — no partition exclusions
CDW10 = 0x02 (Overwrite)	Phase B — 40 cycles of physical NAND cell overwrite
CDW10 = 0x01 (Block Erase)	Phase C — 5 cycles of FTL index teardown
CDW10 = 0x04 (Crypto Erase)	Phase A — 5 cycles of cryptographic key destruction
Log Page 0x81 SSTAT polling	Mandatory after every cycle — SSTAT = 0x1 required before advancing
SANICAP pre-flight check	Verifies drive capability before dispatching any cycle

NVM Express initiated internal review of the AAD-50 specification in June 2026.

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ISO/IEC 27040:2015 — Storage Security

Published by the International Organization for Standardization. Provides guidance on storage security including data sanitization requirements.

ISO/IEC 27040 requires chain-of-custody documentation for sanitization operations. AAD-50 addresses this through:

• Per-cycle telemetry records capturing timestamp, action code, duration, completion status, and active passthrough tier
• SHA-256 hash computed over all 50 cycle records — tamper-evident proof of complete execution
• PDF Certificate of Destruction embedding the audit hash, operator identity, drive serial number, and cycle-by-cycle confirmation
• JSON audit log preserving the full structured record for downstream security auditors

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IEEE 2883-2022 — Standard for Sanitizing Storage

Published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. The current international standard specifically for storage device sanitization, superseding earlier guidance.

IEEE 2883-2022 defines sanitization requirements for solid-state storage including NVMe devices. AAD-50 is designed to meet or exceed its requirements through firmware-level command execution and per-cycle hardware verification.

Formal evaluation against IEEE 2883-2022 has not yet been conducted and represents a necessary step toward regulatory recognition. This is tracked as a roadmap item.

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NVM Express Sanitize Command — ATA/SCSI Predecessors

The Wei et al. (USENIX FAST 2011) empirical study evaluated ATA SECURITY ERASE UNIT and ACS-2 SANITIZE BLOCK ERASE commands — the ATA/SCSI predecessors to NVMe Opcode 0x84. Their findings documented 3 of 12 drives failing to correctly execute the sanitize command they reported supporting.

NVMe Sanitize (Opcode 0x84) improves on its ATA predecessors in two key ways:

• NSID=0xFFFFFFFF broadcasts to all physical blocks including over-provisioned regions — directly addressing the FTL coverage problem Wei et al. documented on ATA drives
• The Log Page 0x81 status reporting mechanism provides a standardised polling interface for completion verification

AAD-50 implements both improvements and adds the per-cycle polling enforcement that neither the ATA predecessors nor the standard nvme-cli tooling provided before PR [#3438].

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nvme-cli v3.0-b.1 — Official Linux NVMe Toolchain

On June 16, 2026, PR [#3438] — implementing --wait and --repeat N based on the verification architecture proposed in RFC [#3415] — was merged into linux-nvme/nvme-cli master by Daniel Wagner, the primary maintainer.

nvme-cli v3.0-b.1 explicitly lists PR [#3438] in its official release changelog:

nvme: add support for sanitize wait option by @ikegami-t in #3438

The verification architecture proposed by AAD-50 is now part of the official Linux NVMe toolchain and ships with virtually every Linux distribution on earth.

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Summary Table

Standard	AAD-50 Alignment	Formal Evaluation
NIST SP 800-88 Rev.2 Purge	Yes — by design	Not yet conducted
NVMe Base Specification 2.0	Full implementation	Confirmed via nvme-cli merge
ISO/IEC 27040:2015	Yes — audit chain and chain of custody	Not yet conducted
IEEE 2883-2022	Yes — by design	Not yet conducted
nvme-cli v3.0-b.1	Core verification architecture merged	Confirmed — commit 84078fa

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Further Reading

• How It Works — the verification architecture explained
• FAQ — common questions including compliance questions
• Whitepaper (Zenodo DOI) — full technical specification with standards mapping
• Roadmap — planned formal evaluation steps

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AAD-50 v1.1 - github.com/yonasabeselom/aad50
Maintained by: Yonas Abeselom - yonas_abeselom@protonmail.com