Paper on data recovery from wiped disks (was: bugtraq () planetcobalt net)

[Ansgar Wiechers <bugtraq () planetcobalt net>]

On 2008-10-09 Craig Wright wrote:
> Myself, Dave Kleiman and Shyaam Sundhar R.S. have a paper submitted
> and accepted for ICISS08 (the Fourth International Conference on
> Information Systems Security (2008)). The paper is titled,
> "Overwriting Hard Drive Data: The Great Wiping Controversy".
>
> The abstract follows:
> "Abstract. Often we hear controversial opinions in digital forensics
> on the required or desired number of passes to utilize for properly
> overwriting, sometimes referred to as wiping or erasing, a modern hard
> drive. The controversy has caused much misconception, with persons
> commonly quoting that data can be recovered if it has only been
> overwritten once or twice. Moreover, referencing that it actually
> takes up to ten, and even as many as 35 (referred to as the Gutmann
> scheme because of the 1996 Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and
> Solid-State Memory published paper by Peter Gutmann) passes to
> securely overwrite the previous data. One of the chief controversies
> is that if a head positioning system is not exact enough, new data
> written to a drive may not be written back to the precise location of
> the original data. We demonstrate that the controversy surrounding
> this topic is unfounded."
>
> The paper is to presented in December this year and is being published
> under the LNCS (Lecture notes in Computer Science) series from
> Springer Verlag.

Sounds interesting. I'll be looking forward to reading your paper.

Regards
Ansgar Wiechers
-- 
"All vulnerabilities deserve a public fear period prior to patches
becoming available."
--Jason Coombs on Bugtraq