Hi! I was wondering if you would consider reducing the number of default overwrites for "shred" from 25 to something more like 5?
We'd like to get shred called from more standard packages (starting with logrotate). For various reasons, plenty of systems seem to have large enough log files (10s of megabytes) to make the shred load spike really nasty on a server. John Gilmore (CCed) has been arguing very strongly that we shouldn't have logrotate override shred's default on this, but should instead be changing shred to get a better default performance/security tradeoff. The literature seems to say that large numbers of writes (25+) were barely adequate on old 80s and 90s disks, but that even a single overwrite cycle is extremely hard to get past on modern disks: http://www.usenix.org/events/sec01/full_papers/bauer/bauer_html/index.html http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-88/NISTSP800-88_rev1.pdf (p 16) I also read a more detailed paper (which unfortunately I can't track down now) which elaborated that the problem on old disks was that performing huge numbers of writes today might lay down a lot of data *next to* where the disk was writing yesterday, but not quite on top of it. The spatial location of the heads is much more precise on modern disks, so this doesn't happen anymore. -- Peter Eckersley [EMAIL PROTECTED] Staff Technologist Tel +1 415 436 9333 x131 Electronic Frontier Foundation Fax +1 415 436 9993 _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list Bug-coreutils@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
