[vox-tech] Secure Wiping hard drives

[Brian Lavender]

Perhaps dd from /dev/zero is the solution for this problem? Wikipedia
makes reference to a SpringerLink publication. See below for both. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_%28Unix%29#Disk_wipe

Wright, Craig; Dave Kleiman2, and Shyaam Sundhar R.S. (2008). "Overwriting
Hard Drive Data: The Great Wiping Controversy". Lecture
Notes in Computer Science. Information Systems Security 5352:
243.257. doi:10.1007/978-3-540-89862-7_21. Retrieved 7 March 2012.




On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 03:47:39PM -0700, Norm Matloff wrote:
> Zeroing out all bytes gives some level of security, but is not enough
> against a truly determined adversary who has lots of resources,
> according to what I've read.
> 
> A disk drive, being a mechanical device, will write to a slightly
> different physical spot each time it writes to a particular bit position
> on the disk.  Sophisticated sensing mechanisms may thus be able to
> determine what had been stored in that bit before a 0 was written to it.
> 
> For that reason, the more sophisticated shredding utilities do more than
> merely write 0s; they will do so multiple times.
> 
> Norm Matloff
> 
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-- 
Brian Lavender
http://www.brie.com/brian/

"There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to
make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other
way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."

Professor C. A. R. Hoare
The 1980 Turing award lecture