Guidelines for Media Sanitization | Draft SP 800-88r2 Available for Public Comment

The initial public draft (ipd) of NIST Special Publication (SP) 800-88r2 (Revision 2), Guidelines for Media Sanitization, is now available for public comment.

Sanitization refers to a process that renders access to target data on the media infeasible for a given level of effort. This guide outlines the important elements of a sanitization program to assist organizations and system owners in making practical sanitization decisions based on the sensitivity of their information.

Important changes in this revision of SP 800-88 include:

• Focus is shifted to establishing an agency or enterprise media sanitization program
• Sanitization technique descriptions are replaced with recommendations to comply with the latest relevant standards
• Security assurance is improved through sanitization validation, which determines the effectiveness of sanitization from a confidentiality and sensitivity perspective
• The concept of logical sanitization is included to consider the presence of storage media in modern computing environments (e.g., the cloud)
• References section is updated to include the latest versions of documents and remove obsolete ones 

The public comment period is open through August 29, 2025. See the publication details for a copy of the draft and instructions for submitting comments.

NOTE: A call for patent claims is included in the front matter of this draft. For additional information, see the Information Technology Laboratory (ITL) Patent Policy – Inclusion of Patents in ITL Publications.