On Wed, Feb 09, 2000 at 05:35:00PM +0100, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
[...]
How about secure deletion?
1.3 used to have some simple minded overwriting of deleted data when the
's' attribute was set. That got lost with 2.0+.
Secure disk overwriting that is immune to
manual surface probing seems to take a lot more effort (Colin Plumb's
sterilize does 25 overwrites with varying bit patterns). Such a complicated
procedure is probably better kept in user space. What I would like is some
way to have a sterilize daemon running, and when a get 's' file gets
deleted the VFS would open a new file descriptor for it, pass it to
sterilized (sterild?) using a unix control message and let it do its job.
What does the audience think? Should such a facility have kernel support
or not? I think secure deletion is an interesting topic and it would be
nice if Linux supported it better.
sterilize also does some tricks to overwrite entries in directories, but
I see no easy way to make that fit into the kernel.
Comments?
-Andi
--
This is like TV. I don't like TV.
