On Sun, Sep 6, 2009 at 3:08 PM, Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. < b...@iguanasuicide.net> wrote:
> In <4aa40ac8.2050...@attglobal.net>, Napoleon wrote: > >John Hasler wrote: > >> I wrote: > >>> If you want to destroy all the data for security purposes install and > >>> use shred. It will take quite a while on a large disk. > >> > >>> Ron Johnson writes: > >>>> This really is a myth. > >> > >>> What is? > >> > >> In actual fact, overwriting with zeros once probably suffices for a > >> modern drive (but there is the problem of bad blocks...) > > > >(Should have gone to the list but I screwed up the first time - sorry). > > > >Overwriting with zeros (or ones) once is not at all secure. > > This is totally, absolutely a myth. The 1996 paper used a recovery > technique > that doesn't work on modern drives, and admitted that only one random write > would likely be more than enough to prevent recovery. More recently, > actual > research was done on the topic, and a single-pass, fixed-pattern (all > zeros) > was still impossible to recover more than a few bytes from a modern hard > drive. > > Zac, do you have the URL for that paper handy? I know you sent it out end > of > last year or the beginning of this one, but I seem to have misplaced it. > Yes I've attached the research paper titled "Overwriting Hard Drive Data: The Great Wiping Controversy"(PDF) that shows this is only a myth. These guys did the work and it's very enlightening. See the chart on page 10 to see how impossible it is to recover bits from an overwritten drive. -- Zac Slade krakr...@gmail.com
