Re: Wanted: Secure-delete utility for Linux

Chris Wedgwood (cw@ix.net.nz)
Wed, 23 Dec 1998 14:28:46 +1300


On Tue, Dec 22, 1998 at 04:57:24PM -0500, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote:

> There's a very good paper on the subject given at a Usenix Security
> Symposium, I think 2 years ago. It showed exactly how much
> information you could glean off of a magnetic disk platter using an
> electron microscope to read out the old magnetic domains. It was
> absolutely spooky --- he was able to read data that had been
> written several write generations beforehand.

Sounds like Peters paper;

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html

This paper was first published in the Sixth USENIX Security Symposium
Proceedings, San Jose, California, July 22-25, 1996

Abstract

With the use of increasingly sophisticated encryption systems, an
attacker wishing to gain access to sensitive data is forced to look
elsewhere for information. One avenue of attack is the recovery of
supposedly erased data from magnetic media or random-access memory.
This paper covers some of the methods available to recover erased data
and presents schemes to make this recovery significantly more
difficult.

-cw

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