On Fri, Jan 18, 2013 at 6:13 AM, Paul Arthur
<[email protected]> wrote:
> Yes. This is the exact same issue secure-delete has, since it uses
> the same approach. shred is just as useful as srm (in fact it's more
> useful, since it doesn't mandate the full, useless run of 38 passes
> that srm does.)
"srm" doesn't mandate rewrites either.
Anyway, I actually forgot about "shred", so I remove my objection.
Other utilities in secure-delete are either simple wrappers of
rarely-used functionality ("sfill", "sswap"), or essentially useless
for modern kernels ("smem" — good luck clearing free RAM in userspace,
been there, tried that).
Some comments on replies in this thread:
1. Multiple rewrites are indeed useless for modern media, see [1].
2. So journal metadata is not cleared. BFD. If you need 100%
guarantees, drop media in acid.
3. Wear leveling on flash media is rarer than you think, and most
likely doesn't do what you think, see [2].
4. Wear leveling is irrelevant for the usual attack vectors, which is
a technician copying your naked gf photos. You need special hardware
to access hidden sectors. If you are worried about that, see (2).
[1] C. Wright et al., “Overwriting Hard Drive Data: The Great Wiping
Controversy”, http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-89862-7_21
[2] E. Gal and S. Toledo, “Algorithms and Data Structures for Flash
Memories”, http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1089733.1089735
--
Maxim Kammerer
Liberté Linux: http://dee.su/liberte
