Need program pointers

[Yves Bellefeuille]

Ben wrote:

>Norton has a decent wipefile. I don't know if it exists with the current
>distribution, but with 4.5(which I have) it has it.

Norton's Wipeinfo is not too bad, but I have found one major problem and
a few minor problems with versions 7 and 8:

Major problem: The documentation says that Wipeinfo automatically disables
Smartcan, the undelete utility. In fact, it doesn't do so, at least on my
system. If you don't disable Smartcan manually, you can simply undelete
the "wiped" files.

For this reason, I no longer trust Wipeinfo to automatically disable my
cache; I turn the cache off manually before using Wipeinfo.

Minor problems: If you use the options to wipe file slack or unused space,
Wipeinfo will not wipe the directory entries for deleted files. Using
DiskEdit in hex view, you can still see that you once had a file called
?ECRET. However, using Wipeinfo to wipe a file will also wipe the
directory entry.

And Wipeinfo will only wipe some areas of the disk (track 0, for example),
if you choose to do a "government wipe". Doing a "fast wipe" will not wipe
these areas, even if you choose to wipe the entire drive.

The documentation for Secure File System (SFS) has interesting information
on wiping disks. Peter Gutmann says this:

   There is a commonly-held belief that there is a US government standard
   for declassifying magnetic media which involves overwriting it three
   times. In fact this method is for declassifying core (computer memory)
   rather than magnetic media. The government standard for declassifying
   magnetic media probably involves concentrated acid, furnaces, belt
   sanders, or any combination of the above.


--
Yves Bellefeuille, Ottawa, Canada
an448 at freenet.carleton.ca (finger here for PGP key)
ua294 at fim.uni-erlangen.de