yes, this reminded me of another brilliant idea. Why don't some cars have a little tiny furnace for stash destruction? If you've got an on-board stash and some Alabama hillbilly with a badge pulls you over, you just hit the button and have you're little stashed incinerated. Who cares if the badge knows you USED TO have something on board? Too late now if any trace of evidence is gone. What's wrong with this idea? -TD
From: Eugen Leitl <eugen@leitl.org> To: cypherpunks@al-qaeda.net Subject: Secure erasing Info (fwd from richard@SCL.UTAH.EDU) Date: Sat, 30 Apr 2005 19:49:56 +0200
----- Forwarded message from Richard Glaser <richard@SCL.UTAH.EDU> -----
From: Richard Glaser <richard@SCL.UTAH.EDU> Date: Wed, 27 Apr 2005 12:17:43 -0600 To: MACENTERPRISE@LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU Subject: Secure erasing Info Reply-To: Mac OS X enterprise deployment project <MACENTERPRISE@LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU>
FYI:
Rendering Drives Completely Unreadable Can be Difficult -------------------------------------------------------
The National Association for Information Destruction has said it cannot endorse the use of wiping applications alone for ensuring that data have been effectively removed from hard drives. NAID executive director Bob Johnson said the only way to ensure that the data will be unreadable is to physically destroy the drives, and even that has to be done in certain ways to ensure its efficacy. Most major PC makers offer a drive destruction service for $20 or $30. Some hardware engineers say they understand why the drives have been created in a way that makes it hard to completely erase the data: customers demanded it because they were afraid of losing information they had stored on their drives. http://news.com.com/2102-1029_3-5676995.html?tag=st.util.print [Editor's Note (Pescatore): Cool, I want a "National Association for Information Destruction" tee shirt. How hard could it be to have an interlock feature - you can really, really clear the drive if you open the case, hold this button down while you delete?
(Ranum): Peter Guttman, from New Zealand, did a terrific talk in 1997 at USENIX in which he showed electromicrographs of hard disk surfaces that had been "wiped" - you could still clearly see the 1s and 0s where the heads failed to line up perfectly on the track during the write/erase sequence. He also pointed out that you can tell more recently written data from less recently written data by the field strength in the area, which would actually make it much easier to tell what had been "wiped" versus what was persistent long-term store. The paper, minus the cool photos may be found at: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html Hard disks, I've found, make satisfying small arms targets.]
Here is Mac OS X software called "SPX" that uses the "Guttman" method of securely deleting data off a hard disk. If you want to donate old HD's this might be the best method for protecting your data that was on the HD other than physically destroying the HD's.
http://rixstep.com/4/0/spx/ --
Thanks:
Richard Glaser University of Utah - Student Computing Labs richard@scl.utah.edu 801-585-8016
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