secure deletion

[Peter J. Holzer]

On 1999-05-20 16:42:26 +0100, Kiril Mitev wrote:
> 
> well, not to split hairs, but if you (1) ARE worried about your disk being
> put into another machine to be read by recovery tools, 
> -> then, you are probably worried about physical access to hardware
> -> then you (theoretically) should be worried about locking up your
> hardware, rather than wiping your disk :-0
> 
> ====
> (1) you the generic user, not you Patrick 

I, the generic user, may be reasonably confident that the sysadmin
hasn't installed any kernel patches which keep a log of every write to
the disk, or that he has disabled the 'wipe-on-delete' feature (assuming
one exists). I may be less confident that he (or somebody else who
gained root access) doesn't run something like strings /dev/sdxx). When
I use PGP for example, the plain text files exist for a short time on
disk (while I am in the editor composing a message, or when I am in the
pager viewing it). If the files are wiped afterwards, the window of
opportunity is probably short enough to be acceptable for most people.

	hp


-- 
   _  | Peter J. Holzer             | Where do you want your keys
|_|_) | Sysadmin WSR / Obmann LUGA  | to go today?
| |   | hjp at wsr.ac.at               |     -- Tom Perrine <tep at SDSC.EDU>
__/   | http://wsrx.wsr.ac.at/~hjp/ |        on bugtraq 1999-04-20
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