Re: [LUG] Cryptonomicon and 6 times overwriting

[Neil Stone <neil@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 31 Jan 2002, Simon Waters wrote:

> Adrian Midgley wrote:
> > Short of encrypting the filestore, just arranging that gone is _gone_ would
> > be a useful thing.
>
> Encrypting the file system is easy in Linux, SuSe include the
> encrypted file system, you just say you want it encrypted. You
> may also want to look at where temporary data is stored /tmp,
> /var/tmp, $TMP $TMP_DIR etc.
>
> Usually to extract any useful information from empty blocks you
> need root access, I suspect there are probably ways of grabbing
> some "empty" disk space as a non-root user without zeroing it,
> whether you can do so meaningfully is an interesting question.
>
> Overwriting data 6 fold is way over the top for most data, it
> was suggested that the millitary intelligence groups do such
> things, but I've only ever heard of them using hammers and
> incinerators to deal with redundant electronic systems with
> sensitive data. Which do you think makes more sense?

Yeah, the military do take thes precautions. I used to be part of a 3500 
machine rollout. they went from Win 3.11 on 486/596's to P2 300 (biggest 
at that time) frequestly still using Win 3.11 !(god only knows why)

But as part of the data security procedures we had to run a program that 
did the following... removed the partition, re-created it, formatted the 
drive, write 0', then 1's.. 2's.. 3's.. anything up to 32 times..

Once all machines were "clean" they were then passed to local schools... i 
wander if they installed linux 1st ??? hmmm....

Neil Stone


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