Hi Arrakistor, Wear-levelling (TrueFFS) is another security issue to concider as USB are not magnetic you can't be postive all data has been over-written properly (if they'r using wear-levelling that is). As a fix for this an end-user can format there USB with a file-system (eg. Fat, NTFS, UFS, etc) which _should_ fix the security issue.
Please see this 01' paper by Perter Guttmann "Data Remanence in Semiconductor Devices" (see section 6.4): <http://www.usenix.org/events/sec01/full_papers/gutmann/gutmann_html/> Here is a great and relevent thread from TC forums: <http://forums.truecrypt.org/viewtopic.php?t=1702&postdays=0&postorder=asc> Quote: (again formatting the USB with file system should fix this issue) ----- USB drives use wear-levelling algorithms - sort of a low level file format that resides in the key and is lower level than the operating system's file system. Whenever a file is written to the USB key, it distrubtes the file in a psuedo-random fashion across the key's memory cells so that no one cell gets written too many times. This extends the operative life of the key because any one memory cell has a limited number of writes before it dies. Therefore, since most shredding alog's essentially write files full of random data a certain number of times, there is no way of knowing if the particular data you wanted "erased" has in fact been overwritten even once. ---- P.S. Maybe TorPark should have it's own mailing list to keep this one clean? Anogeorgeo, __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
