Data destruction

From: Elmer E. Dow (elmeredow_at_earthlink.net)
Date: 12/29/04

  • Next message: Wade Chandler: "Re: Data destruction" 
    Date: Wed, 29 Dec 2004 14:38:34 -0700
To: <redhat-list@redhat.com>

    Greetings:

    This post is not RH specific, but given the experience level of the list
    participants, it seems like the likely place to seek input on this subject.
    If there's a more appropiate place to post, please let me know.

    I'm researching available data destruction programs that I could use for
    getting rid of an organization's financial info, etc. before
    donating/disposing/reusing an old computer. Have any of you used the
    following programs? Good or bad experience? Any words of advice?

    Darik's Boot & Nuke (http://dban.sourceforge.net/) can be installed on a
    diskette or CD. It appears to be a one-function live distro for the paranoid.
    Just stick it in the drive and hit enter and it'll overwrite everything. The
    caution to clearly label the disk seems justified.

    Secure Delete (http://freshmeat.net/projects/securedelete/?topic_id=43) is a
    bit more versatile: "Secure Delete is a set of three utilities to perform the
    following: secure deletion of files, secure overwriting of the unused
    diskspace on the harddisk, and secure overwriting and cleaning of the swap
    filesystem."

    I also found a program called Wipe (http://wipe.sourceforge.net/). It's the
    one that's commonly included on live forensic or security distros (see
    http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd.php). However, the site states
    "There are some low level issues that must be taken into consideration. One
    of these is that there must be some sort of write barrier between passes.
    Wipe uses fdatasync(2) (or fsync(2)) as a write barrier, or if fsync(2) isn't
    available, the file is opened with the O_DSYNC or O_SYNC flag. For wipe to be
    effective, each pass must be completely written. To ensure this, the drive
    must support some form of a write barrier, write cache flush, or write cache
    disabling."

    Can someone with more knowledge than I tell this greenhorn just what the above
    paragraph means and how one could be sure that the machine would do this? If
    it needs fsync, then shouldn't it simply be run from a live distro that could
    provide that? Am I correct in assuming that each of these programs would wipe
    all partitions of a disk regardless of the file system used (ext. 2, ext. 3,
    FAT32, NTFS, etc.)?

    Elmer 

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  • Next message: Wade Chandler: "Re: Data destruction"

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