secure deletion

[James Wyatt]

On Wed, 19 May 1999, Ilmar S. Habibulin wrote:
> May be it's an freebsd-fs@ question, but i think that it belings here to.
> I heard that some linux fs (maybe extfs2?) have some secure deletion flag,
> which being set on inode(file or dir) cause content of this file to be
> wiped before deletion, so even if somebody manage to restore file, its
> content would be unusable. I think, that it is nice feature, and i would
> like to see it in freebsd. What would you say?

My first thought was, what a great idea for /etc/master.passwd which gets
flushed every time a user updates their password. Good idea for any file
containing decrypted data.

My second thought of the impact of support for wiping in the kernel... If
I really wanted to slow down a server I didn't like, setting this flag for
files in /tmp and CGI-interim results piping and caching sounds like it
could quietly drive disk IO up quite a bit. - Jy@

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