Re: Consequences of not really understanding

Subject: Re: Consequences of not really understanding
From: Sandy Harris <sandy -at- storm -dot- ca>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2001 13:52:15 -0500

Stan Schwartz wrote:
>
> >Here in the UK, the Navy have such faith in the technology for wiping
> >hard drives that on one job I did in the 80s they paid to have the
> >drives smashed with a large hammer when the job was done :-)

There actually is a US DOD standard for wiping drives. I once had a copy,
and wrote a C program that implemented it for single files.

That standard is only applied for some security levels. Higher levels
require physical destruction of the drive.

> With the right software and patience, data can be recovered, intact,
> after three overwrites.

See Peter Gutmann's page:
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/

Among other things, it has a Usenix paper of his that is the standard
reference on such data recovery, papers pointing out flaws in Norton
file encryption, and an enormous collection of crypto links.

> The more regular the overwrite pattern
> (10101010... as opposed to something more 'random' like 28472849...)
> the easier it is to filter out.

The standard I saw required at least three overwrites. one with all-1s,
one all 0s, one with random data. That is not enough to stop Gutmann's
attacks, but I read that standard years ago and it may have changed.

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References:
RE: Consequences of not really understanding: From: Damien Braniff
RE: Consequences of not really understanding: From: Stan Schwartz

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