Wiping Out Data

[Jeffrey F. Bloss]

Matthew Flaschen wrote:

> Jeffrey F. Bloss wrote:
> > I'd wager that dd fails in this context too, even if as Matt suggested
> > you immediately recreate a file system on the "overwritten" device.
> 
> Well, that explains why dd is useless for this.  However, I
> /recommended/ shred, which does work.

That's what I've always used, and it certainly does work better than
dd. But just to beat the dead horse one more time, on journaling file
systems or any other "caching" scenario shred is likely to fail too.
Not as horribly as dd perhaps, but in the context of a powerful
attacker's ability to recover data forensically it's still a crap shoot
in my opinion. Degaussing is a better option if you can swing it, but
in the practical world the only truly secure way to keep data from being
recovered is strong encryption... making the issue of physical recovery
irrelevant.

Of course in the *practical* world 'rm' might be enough if your
"attacker" is very weak. ;-)

-- 
     _?_      Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend.
    (o o)         Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.
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                    http://wrench.homelinux.net/~jeff/
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