On Thu, Jan 17, 2013 at 10:58 PM, Peter Stuge <pe...@stuge.se> wrote: > CAUTION: Note that shred relies on a very important assumption: that > the file system overwrites data in place. This is the traditional way > to do things, but many modern file system designs do not satisfy this > assumption.
Whether the time for these utilities has fully come or not I won't comment on, but they're already obsolete, at least the way they operate. Really the only way to do secure deletion of data is to support it at the filesystem level, and make it an ioctl or whatever. And if you're going to do that you might as well encrypt all the data in the first place with file/block-specific keys that change on overwrites/deletes/etc). The sorts of things that make shred possible are the same sorts of things that tend to shred your data when you don't want to lose it. This is really beyond the realm of userspace as a result, now. Rich
