bugtraq - Re: RE: Peter Gutmann data deletion theaory?

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Date: Thu, 28 Jul 2005 00:33:28 -0500 (CDT)
From: Simple Nomad <thegnome@...c.org>
To: Ron van Daal <ronvdaal@....nl>
Cc: bugtraq@...urityfocus.com
Subject: Re: RE: Peter Gutmann data deletion theaory?

On Sat, 23 Jul 2005, Ron van Daal wrote:

>> We were not allowed to do a seven pass government wipe to dispose of the 
>> drives as our security people deemed it inadequate, we turned them over to 
>> our classified waste people who stored them until there were enough to 
>> justify having the platters removed and mechanicaly beaten into little 
>> lumps of metal.

There is no 7 pass government wipe. It is a 3 pass wipe. It is referred to 
as a 7 pass wipe because an app that did a 7 pass wipe passed govt muster 
and was purchased. Odds are that if it had done it in 3 wipes it would 
have still passed. If a vendor is saying "we do a 7 pass govt wipe" ask 
them if one of those passes involves *verifiying* the writing of random 
data, and if one of the passes in the inversion of another wipe (i.e. a 
wipe with 0x0f and a wipe with 0xf0) to the drive. If not, it won't pass 
that "government standard" I referred to in another post a few days ago.

> Aren't you being too paranoid? I think a simple zeroing out of your entire 
> drive using dd(1) starting with the first sector is enough to cover your
> privacy. I don't know about other ""secret"" government agencies in NL or 
> other counties who actually do microscopic magnetic recovery efforts, but
> dd(1) does the trick to defeat disk analysis by our national digital crime 
> unit. From what I've read in one of their internal memo's is that they just
> use a hexdump(1) alike utility to find any non-zero bytes on the drive to 
> conclude "the drive has been wiped entirely".

I basically agree with this. If any government can recover data via some 
ninja electron microscope fu, odds are it is a state secret and they 
wouldn't reveal they got your data nor reveal it in court (then it 
wouldn't be a state secret anymore...) so it truly is a moot point, unless 
the recovered data makes you an enemy combatant or something. Again, we 
really have covered this topic several times here.

-SN, fairly drunk in Vegas so hopefully this made sense....