Hi, On 9 Aug 2003 koxenrider@sol-biotech.com wrote: > To indulge my paranoia I wrote a little ANSI C program to write random > data to a drive. I wrote it targeted toward Windows, but it should work > with minimal editing on any machine with an ANSI C compiler. It can be > found at http://www.sol-biotech.com/code/wipeIt/wipeIt.c and I placed it > in the public domain. This is believed to be insufficiant. Extract of the wipe program man page : << Recovery of supposedly erased data from magnetic media is easier than what many people would like to believe. A technique called Magnetic Force Microscopy (MFM) allows any moderately funded opponent to recover the last two or three layers of data written to disk; wipe repeadetly overwrites special patterns to the files to be destroyed, using the fsync() call and/or the O_SYNC bit to force disk access. In normal mode, 34 patterns are used (of which 8 are random). These patterns were recommended in an article from Peter Gutmann (pgut001at_private) entitled "Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory". A quick mode allows you to use only 4 passes with random patterns, which is of course much less secure. >> -- Philippe Biondi <biondi@ cartel-securite.fr> Cartel Sécurité Security Consultant/R&D http://www.cartel-securite.fr PGP KeyID:3D9A43E2 FingerPrint:C40A772533730E39330DC0985EE8FF5F3D9A43E2 ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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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