NIST SP 800-88 Rev. 2

What NIST SP 800-88 is

NIST SP 800-88 helps organisations make data on storage media inaccessible before the media are reused, leave the organisation or are disposed of. Sanitisation, in NIST terms, means that access to the data is infeasible for a given level of recovery effort.

Revision 2 (September 2025) puts more weight on an organisation-wide sanitisation programme: policy, roles, verification and documentation. For the technical details of each technique it refers to other specifications, including IEEE 2883 and NSA/CSS specifications.

Clear, purge and destroy

• Clear protects against simple recovery, for example by overwriting. Suitable when media stay within the organisation.
• Purge protects against laboratory recovery. For magnetic media, degaussing with a suitable degausser is a purge technique; the media remain physically intact, but a hard drive no longer works afterwards.
• Destroy makes the media unusable and recovery infeasible, for example by disintegration, pulverisation, shredding or melting.

Which method fits depends on the type of media, the sensitivity of the data and what happens to the media afterwards.

What this means for your equipment

Hard drives and tapes can be purged with a degausser and then physically destroyed with a destroyer if your policy requires destroy. SSDs and flash memory cannot be degaussed; for them, physical destruction with an SSD insert or a shredder applies.

NIST also asks you to verify and record the result. IRONCLAD records every item with a photo, the result and a certificate.

NIST SP 800-88 does not certify machines. A machine supports a method; whether your process meets the guideline depends on your policy, procedures and records.