On Fri, 18 Jan 2002 Valdis.Kletnieksat_private wrote: > > dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hdb > > GAAAK!!!! No! No! No! > > This will *NOT* do what you want it to do. Well, at the risk of descending into a flame war over a trivial point, yes it _does_ do what I want. I think you misunderstood the objective. The point was _not_ to create ideal random data for the disk, but simply to overwrite it with something. Anything. Your MP3 collection. Grandma's recipies. Whatever you like. It doesn't really matter all that much. A few passes with with different 'unpredictable' data, and the original is gone. Finish it up with /dev/zero just to be neat and tidy. The disk with the old data is now clean enough to resuse for evidence collection. I agree that the random drivers available in Linux are slow and not really all that random. I have a little gadget (essentially a white noise generator) that sucks pretty good entropy from the air whenever I need to stir things up a bit. Other readers interested such things this should read "Random Number Machines" [1] As before, I say: > Disclaimer: Regular readers of this list will of course have several > refinements to suggest. The above is meant as a simple introduction to > the process to demonstrate how easy it is, not as a definitive > reference... > Remember: Thou Shalt Not Drain the Entropy Pool Un-needfully. Entropy isn't what it used to be... Cheers! --- Richard Chadderton ______ [1] "Random Number Machines: A Literature Survey", by Terry Ritter. http://www.ciphersbyritter.com/RES/RNGMACH.HTM ----------------------------------------------------------------- This list is provided by the SecurityFocus ARIS analyzer service. For more information on this free incident handling, management and tracking system please see: http://aris.securityfocus.com
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