secure deletion

[Snob Art Genre]

On Thu, 20 May 1999, Patrick Bihan-Faou wrote:

> - basic: what the original poster was suggesting: writing garbage data (be
> it zero or some pattern) over the deleted chunks. The clear advantage of
> that is that if you try to recover the freed blocks on a system comparable
> to the original system, you will probably not get anything useful out of the
> disk.

If I understand correctly, it's conceivable that someone could break into my
system over the network and get access to the raw disk device, and thereby
read data that have been deleted but not overwritten.  That's a good bit
easier than physically breaking in and taking the disk.

So I can see some use for functionality that overwrites files on unlink()
thoroughly enough to prevent further reading by the disk head, even if it
offers no protection against the kind of specialized reading devices that
can be used on a captured hard disk platter.

I'm not advocating this measure so much as pointing out that there is a
perceptible level of security between what we currently have and
military-grade.


 Ben

@narcissus.net -- finally

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