[ale] Need an iso to wipe hard drives.

[krwatson at cc.gatech.edu]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Brian
> Pitts
> Sent: Friday, April 16, 2010 12:04
> To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts - Yes! We run Linux!
> Subject: Re: [ale] Need an iso to wipe hard drives.
> 
> On 04/16/2010 11:31 AM, Greg Freemyer wrote:
> >
> > NIST has a sanitation paper that says disk drives of 20GB or larger
> > capacity are not recoverable even via laboratory means after a single
> > wipe with zero's.
> >
> > So your just wasting cpu cycles using /dev/urandom.  Just use
> > /dev/zero.  And just do it once.
> 
> The link you shared to a discussion of that paper a while back is dead.
> Do you know of any more sources? I'd really like to have something to
> wave at the "you must wipe it 27 times" people.
> 
> > Also, ext2/3 reserves x% of the drive for root, so if your doing the
> > above as a normal user, your missing that x%.  I think x% is 5%, but I
> > don't recall for sure.  And 5% of 1TB is 50GB, so it is a big deal.
> 
> At Free IT Athens, we run sfill and sswap from the secure-delete suite
> of tools as a post-install action to securely erase all unused space on
> a system being refurbished. sfill sipes the disk space and inode space,
> and sswap takes care of the swap partition.
> 
> --
> All the best,
> Brian Pitts


Brian,

This is discussed in the "Feasibility of recovering overwritten data" section of this article.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_remanence

You can get the 2006 NIST Special Publication 800-88 here
http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-88/NISTSP800-88_rev1.pdf

You can get "Overwriting Hard Drive Data The Great Wiping Controversy" here
http://infosecurity.us/public_docs/Overwriting%20Hard%20Drive%20Data%20-%20The%20Great%20Wiping%20Controversy.pdf

http://preview.tinyurl.com/y2rmydd

keith

-- 

Keith R. Watson                        Georgia Institute of Technology
Systems Support Specialist IV          College of Computing
keith.watson at cc.gatech.edu             801 Atlantic Drive NW
(404) 385-7401                         Atlanta, GA  30332-0280