Re: Shred 1.0 Bug Report

["M. Leo Cooper" <thegrendel () THERIVER COM>]

On Tue, 10 Oct 2000, Jeff Harlan wrote:

> Ran a test with Shred v1.0 and found some
> unexpected results.  This utility is supposed to
> overwrite a file with several passes of different
> bit patterns followed by one random pattern.  The
> file is then unlinked.  This is supposed to make
> the file unrecoverable with utilities which read
> raw disk blocks.  Using the icat utility from Dan
> Farmer and Wietze Venema's  TCT Toolkit it appears
> that the data is not overwritten.  This test was
> done on two different RedHat 6.0 systems.

It has been a couple of years since I actively worked on "shred". In
response to your e-mail, Jeff, when I tested the program, it no longer
worked as specified. In fact, when compiled on a glibc 2.1 machine,
"shred" coredumps. It appears that this package is a victim of the
changes made to libc.

I therefore advise discontinuation of the use of the "shred" package. I
have no plans to bugfix or update it, since Tom Vier's "wipe" package
accomplishes the same job, and in a more thorough fashion.

Jeff, I do have to question whether it was appropriate to notify
Bugtraq, since "shred" was never, to my knowledge, a part of any Linux
distribution.

Thanks for the notification.


Mendel