Ted Unangst <[email protected]> wrote:

> So I'm wiping a file from a fairly slow USB stick and it's taking
> forever.  I don't really give a shit about some guy with a quantum
> tachyon microscope taking it apart,

But if you do, overwriting with a constant pattern is stupid.  You
want to overwrite the old data with random bytes, effectively running
a stream cipher on any remnant signal.

(And forget about this with flash media, where you each write to
the same logical block may end up in different physical blocks.)

> I just want the files to be gone
> enough that a simple undelete tool won't bring them back.  The three
> wipes is the charm approach of rm -P is a little heavy handed.
> 
> What I propose is making -P wipe the file once each time it's
> provided.  I get the simple whack the data for good option I want, the
> paranoid weirdos get the rm `jot -b -P 4096` scrubber they want.

Replace the memset() in pass() with arc4random_buf() and I'm starting
to like it.

-- 
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber                          [email protected]

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