Secure erasing Info

Richard Glaser richard at SCL.UTAH.EDU
Wed Apr 27 11:17:43 PDT 2005


<MACENTERPRISE at 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 at scl.utah.edu
801-585-8016

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