Re: Program to wipe data from disk free space

[Philippe Biondi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>]

Hi,

On 9 Aug 2003 [EMAIL PROTECTED] 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  ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) 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



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