I've worked in secure envrioments before and the ONLY thing that the NSA 
really believes works is the 
put-the-disk-on-a-rock-and-hit-it-with-a-hammer method.   I've seen the 
programs for the PCs and basicly all they do is varients on what people 
have already suggested, writing patterns over the file sectors.   And I 
don't honesty believe the PC versions are anymore than snake-oil when it 
comes to GOOD recovery technique.

I would suggest that you not empty the entroy pool by using /dev/random.

The other thing that you have to watch on Unix systems is a lot of them 
have jourling file systems, and there is no guarentee that when you 
write on a section of a file it will be the same sectors that had the 
original data.  (What I'm saying here is someone needs to do some diving 
into the SGI code and figure out if lseek(1024); write( FILE, 'X'); will 
really over write the old byte there or it could copy the sector with 
the change and then fix up the referances.)

johno

Sharon Nagao wrote:

>Does anyone know of an application that can overwrite
>a file such that it is virtually impossible to read
>the data in the file back from disk using forensic 
>methods on unix machines (Irix in particular).
>
>I understand such applications exist for Windows
>machines, but I can't seem to find anything for SGIs.
>
>Many thanks in advance to all those who respond.
>
>
>- sharon
>
>
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