wipe /dev/sda

[Florian Diesch]

"Neil Aggarwal" <neil at JAMMConsulting.com> wrote:

> Florian:
>
>> > http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html
>> Note that this paper is 13 years old and the technology used by hard
>> discs has changed since that quite a bit.
>
> The author addresses that in his Further Epilogue:
>
> 	This is why I've never updated my paper (I've had a number of 
> 	requests), there doesn't seem to be much more to be said about 
> 	the topic. 
>
> So, basically, he says it was not a big deal then and it is even
> less of a big deal now.

To cite the Epilogue:

  | Looking at this from the other point of view, with the
  | ever-increasing data density on disk platters and a corresponding
  | reduction in feature size and use of exotic techniques to record
  | data on the medium, it's unlikely that anything can be recovered
  | from any recent drive except perhaps a single level via basic
  | error-cancelling techniques. In particular the drives in use at
  | the time that this paper was originally written have mostly fallen
  | out of use, so the methods that applied specifically to the older,
  | lower-density technology don't apply any more. Conversely, with
  | modern high-density drives, even if you've got 10KB of sensitive
  | data on a drive and can't erase it with 100% certainty, the
  | chances of an adversary being able to find the erased traces of
  | that 10KB in 80GB of other erased traces are close to zero.




   Florian
-- 
<http://www.florian-diesch.de/>