full-disclosure - Re: Disk wiping -- An alternate approach?

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Date: Mon, 25 Jan 2010 17:26:42 +0545
From: Bipin Gautam <bipin.gautam@...il.com>
To: Valdis.Kletnieks@...edu
Cc: full-disclosure <full-disclosure@...ts.grok.org.uk>
Subject: Re: Disk wiping -- An alternate approach?

hahaha!

Ok, let a Alice/chatterbox run through your harddisk! :P

[1] http://alice.pandorabots.com/

On 1/25/10, Valdis.Kletnieks@...edu <Valdis.Kletnieks@...edu> wrote:
> On Mon, 25 Jan 2010 01:09:40 +0545, Bipin Gautam said:
>
>> So, plausible deniability solution for disk wiping?:
>>
>> Let, disk wiping tools LOAD the whole WIKIPEDIA in nxn matrices and
>> mix ALL the words & phrases in a random pool continuously and use THIS
>> as the "Wiping passes and patterns" while they wipe the disk-space
>> (instead of using random-pass or zero) and let the people who dont
>> need-to-know make sense of whatever they want to pull up from the
>> 'patterns' generated from the ENCYCLOPEDIA OF KNOWLEDGE & unlimited
>> keywords and phrases and counter the same?
>
> The problem is that although using Markov chains to generate pseudo-random
> text, it's usually pretty obviously pseudo-random text. And in fact, they're
> usually so random that it's pretty obvious it's just random words and
> doesn't
> prove anything more or less than acres of zeros.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociated_press
>
> The problem is that every once in a while, those things actually generate
> short chunks of intelligible text (especially when using a longer chain
> length).  So now, instead of being able to say to the district attorney
>
> "The disk was full of zeros, and you can't prove what was on it before".
>
> you're now saying to him:
>
> "What do you mean, you found the phrase 'Drop the cocaine and kiddie porn
> off
> at my place around 9PM' on block 239349 of my hard drive?"
>
> Generally a bad idea.
>

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