I have a question regarding the ideas which have been circulating about using CD ROMs as key storage. How does one go about rapidly and effectively erasing everything on a CD ROM? The reason I ask is, in the case of OTPs you want to cancel your key as it's used, to prevent accidental double-use of key; and of course in any system you want to make sure that all your crypto material can be wiped squeaky clean in the event of a barbarian invasion.
-gg
A lab proven method: Take CD-ROM. Place in standard kitchen microwave. Set on high power cook for 5 seconds. Press start. Watch the action. Hang resulting artifact on wall as curiosity, which is all it's good for now. Let the wave air out a little (this won't fry it). A great way of trashing obsolete but confidential CD's, and perhaps the cypherpunk equivalent of flushing the dope stash. Tim O.
>I have a question regarding the ideas which have been circulating >about using CD ROMs as key storage. How does one go about >rapidly and effectively erasing everything on a CD ROM? A lab proven method: Take CD-ROM. Place in standard kitchen microwave. Set on high power cook for 5 seconds. Press start. Watch the action. Hang resulting artifact on wall as curiosity, which is all it's good for now. Let the wave air out a little (this won't fry it). You should know better than this. Microwaving cracks the aluminum coating into a lot of small pieces, but almost all the pieces are larger than a few square mm. even if you cook until quite "well done". A few mm. of a CD is a *lot* of contiguous bits that could be recovered by a determined enough adversary, and you likely wouldn't ebe bothering with OTP's unless you're concerned with very determined adversaries. I agree with the person who griped that OTP's are making excessive list traffic compared with interesting protocols, etc. OTP's get rehashed on sci.crypt every few months, as that person pointed out.
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