Security Basics mailing list archives
Re: Optical media destruction Was: Hard drives v. CF/Smart media/etc.
From: "Jeffrey F. Bloss" <jbloss () tampabay rr com>
Date: Wed, 26 Oct 2005 22:57:20 -0400
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Tuesday 25 October 2005 07:40 pm, Alloishus BeauMains wrote:
Fire.......just melt it. However, shredding a CD will pretty much do the trick for all but the most dedicated intents and purposes. I almost doubt even the government would go that far to try and resurrect a CD that has been through a shredder. Not only would you have to piece together the CD, and then read the information off of it. You would problablythen need to unscramble the pieces somehow. It would be a super act to actually get the pieces to be correctly aligned, especially if the CD was shredded fine enough. As far as I know, there really isn't an algorithm out there that will unscramble something that drastically fubarred. So, the time you would have to take in order to get it right by hand would be enormous.
I disagree. I think it would be considerably easier to put a shredded CD back together than it would be a comparable sized paper document. It's already in digital format, so you could apply computer power without the additional loss of having to digitize the document first. There's no need to really put the physical CD back together. Just dump the pieces into a machine that spread them out in a single layer and move the laser across the pieces. You'd get a bunch of data "fragments", but for text I'd think you could at the least systematically put fragments together and feed them to a high tech spelling and grammar checker. Throw a couple super computers at a CD full of text and I'll bet you'd be surprised at how fast you'd start seeing real results. ;) I'd wager binary data wouldn't be far behind. Encrypted data might be a bit more problematic, but then again, why bother... it's assumed the encryption would make rebuilding the CD a useless exercise. - -- Hand crafted on October 26, 2005 at 22:45:26 -0400 Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read. -Groucho Marx -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFDYEIWRHqalLqKnCkRAm+hAJ9QcP41T5SbkrC0QXrGCSy/BD/TXgCfVB/0 Kwe2t/kCvFMBKmhMnLD9NCM= =SQSl -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Current thread:
- RE: Hard drives v. CF/Smart media/etc. Herman Frederick Ebeling, Jr. (Oct 21)
- Re: Hard drives v. CF/Smart media/etc. FocusHacks (Oct 21)
- RE: Hard drives v. CF/Smart media/etc. Herman Frederick Ebeling, Jr. (Oct 21)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: Hard drives v. CF/Smart media/etc. FocusHacks (Oct 21)
- RE: Hard drives v. CF/Smart media/etc. Brian Loe (Oct 24)
- RE: Hard drives v. CF/Smart media/etc. Herman Frederick Ebeling, Jr. (Oct 24)
- Optical media destruction Was: Hard drives v. CF/Smart media/etc. Alexander Klimov (Oct 25)
- Re: Optical media destruction Was: Hard drives v. CF/Smart media/etc. Terence Summers (Oct 26)
- Re: Optical media destruction Was: Hard drives v. CF/Smart media/etc. Alloishus BeauMains (Oct 26)
- Re: Optical media destruction Was: Hard drives v. CF/Smart media/etc. Jeffrey F. Bloss (Oct 27)
- RE: Hard drives v. CF/Smart media/etc. Brian Loe (Oct 24)
- Re: Hard drives v. CF/Smart media/etc. FocusHacks (Oct 21)
- Re: Hard drives v. CF/Smart media/etc. Fred Cohen (Oct 25)
- Re: Hard drives v. CF/Smart media/etc. Fred Cohen (Oct 25)