David =?iso-8859-1?Q?H=E4rdeman?= writes... > If you are concerned with the safety of your personal data being left > from a previous installation, I assume you're also (and even more so) > worried about your personal data being kept safe in the new > installation? > > If so, I'd assume that you'd do an install to an encrypted > partition...and if you do, debian-installer (or partman-crypto to be > more precise) will already wipe the disk with one round of random data. > > That should be sufficient for anything but the worst tin foil hat > scenarios.
I recently discovered that Peter Gutmann added an Epilogue to his original paper, http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html (search for Epilogue) or reprinted at http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/Epilogue_to_Gutmann's_1996_paper in it he explains that with modern drives, a few passes of random data is the best you can hope to do. I think your suggestion of using partman-crypto to wipe the disk with one round of random data is probably OK. I haven't tried using it yet, can you do this step without also creating a new crypto filesystem on the disk as well? Ideally you could just do the wipe only so if you were just trying to clean the disk you could stop there and not bother to put anything else on it(for cleanliness reasons, not because of the time/cpu it takes to generate the new filesystem). So I consider the wishlist to be able to wipe the disk closed, but I'd like to be able to do it without also creating a new filesystem if possible (this could be in expert mode of course). Thanks, -- Matt Taggart [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
