Bugtraq mailing list archives
Re: Peter Gutmann data deletion theaory?
From: Dana Hudes <dhudes () tcp-ip info>
Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2005 20:31:08 -0400 (EDT)
The NSA disagree and have conducted laboratory tests. I work for NYC as a unix admin (Solaris). We use the sun format purge to erase disks (that can be written to; drives that won't spin up or can't be written are another problem). I guarantee that a sufficiently strong degausser will erase your data...along with the timing tracks and possibly burning out micromotors and ball bearings. Its a question of how many oersteds you need for the drive so that the magnetic field penetrates the housing (take out the platters and you have another situation entirely). I don't have the site bookmarked at home but NIST or NSA have a site which reviews the degaussing equipment and other data erasure techniques. On Wed, 20 Jul 2005, Jared Johnson wrote:
All, Do you all agree with Peter Gutman's conclusion on his theory that data can never really be erased, as noted in his quote below: "Data overwritten once or twice may be recovered by subtracting what is expected to be read from a storage location from what is actually read. Data which is overwritten an arbitrarily large number of times can still be recovered provided that the new data isn't written to the same location as the original data (for magnetic media), or that the recovery attempt is carried out fairly soon after the new data was written (for RAM). For this reason it is effectively impossible to sanitise storage locations by simple overwriting them, no matter how many overwrite passes are made or what data patterns are written. However by using the relatively simple methods presented in this paper the task of an attacker can be made significantly more difficult, if not prohibitively expensive." It seems that the perhaps the only real way to rid your Hard Drives of data is to burn them. I'd love to hear some thoughts on this from security and data experts out there.
Current thread:
- Re: Peter Gutmann data deletion theaory?, (continued)
- Re: Peter Gutmann data deletion theaory? Jay D. Dyson (Jul 21)
- Re: Peter Gutmann data deletion theaory? Thor (Hammer of God) (Jul 22)
- Re: Peter Gutmann data deletion theaory? Simple Nomad (Jul 21)
- Re: Peter Gutmann data deletion theaory? Volker Tanger (Jul 22)
- Re: Peter Gutmann data deletion theaory? Alexander L. Ivanchev (Jul 27)
- Re: Peter Gutmann data deletion theaory? Casper . Dik (Jul 27)
- Re: Peter Gutmann data deletion theaory? Vincent DUVERNET (Nolmë Informatique) (Jul 22)
- Re: Peter Gutmann data deletion theaory? Jake Appelbaum (Jul 27)
- RE: Peter Gutmann data deletion theaory? Jared Johnson (Jul 22)
- Re: Peter Gutmann data deletion theaory? Volker Tanger (Jul 22)
- RE: Peter Gutmann data deletion theaory? D. Weiss (Jul 22)
- Re: Peter Gutmann data deletion theaory? Dana Hudes (Jul 22)
- Re: [BugTraq] Peter Gutmann data deletion theaory? Robin Whittle (Jul 22)
- Re: [BugTraq] Peter Gutmann data deletion theaory? Volker Kuhlmann (Jul 27)
- RE: Peter Gutmann data deletion theaory? dave kleiman (Jul 27)
- RE: Peter Gutmann data deletion theaory? Jeremy Epstein (Jul 21)
- RE: Peter Gutmann data deletion theaory? Glenn.Everhart (Jul 21)
- Re: RE: Peter Gutmann data deletion theaory? underwood-de (Jul 22)
- Re: RE: Peter Gutmann data deletion theaory? Ron van Daal (Jul 27)
- Re: RE: Peter Gutmann data deletion theaory? Simple Nomad (Jul 28)
- Re: RE: Peter Gutmann data deletion theaory? Ron van Daal (Jul 27)
- RE: Peter Gutmann data deletion theaory? Earnhart, Benjamin J (Jul 22)
- Re: Peter Gutmann data deletion theaory? Casper . Dik (Jul 27)
(Thread continues...)
- Re: Peter Gutmann data deletion theaory? Jay D. Dyson (Jul 21)