Security Basics mailing list archives
Re: Hard Drive data security
From: Atom 'Smasher' <atom () suspicious org>
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 15:28:05 -0400 (EDT)
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I have a question about hard drive data security. The hard drive on my notebook is failing and Dell is going to replace it. They are going to take the old one with them. How can I securely remove the data from the hard drive?
=========================there are several ways to do this, some good, some bad... i'm not going to attempt to cover all of the possibilities; i'll just mention what i'd do (i consider it to be good)... this assumes you're in a *nix environment.
install the drive on a computer that's running some flavor of *nix. don't mount the drive. let's say, hypothetically, the system sees at /dev/hd2. one way to write random garbage to the disk is:
cat /dev/urandom > /dev/hd2this will probably take a while and may slow everything down, but it's thoroughly wiping the disk.
repeat as necessary, based on what you perceive your threat model to be. if you're concerned about the drive showing up on ebay or a garage sale, wiping it once or twice should be fine. if you're concerned that a govt spy agency is taking interest in your data, wipe at least seven times.
i will point out the urandom is a CSPRNG, not a ~true~ RNG. this may be a concern to some in the tin-foil-hat crowd, and can be solved with:
tail -f /dev/random > /dev/hd2 but that will take a *really* *long* time to fill up a disk. ...atom _________________________________________ PGP key - http://atom.smasher.org/pgp.txt 762A 3B98 A3C3 96C9 C6B7 582A B88D 52E4 D9F5 7808 ------------------------------------------------- "The World Bank, IMF, and private banks have consistently lavished huge sums on terror regimes, following their displacement of democratic governments, and a number of quantitative studies have shown a systematic positive relationship between U.S. and IMF/World Bank aid to countries and their violations of human rights." -- Edward S. Herman, economist, U.S. media and foreign policy critic, author of 'The Real Terror Network' -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.3.6 (FreeBSD) Comment: What is this gibberish? Comment: http://atom.smasher.org/links/#digital_signatures iQEcBAEBCAAGBQJBXF5VAAoJEAx/d+cTpVciiPIH/3UuIwIJ9buAP9NSpiXTe+52 5RZe5HZbwiAE1vO/lULcDlbdQPolLaLJ8KKmgyTR21hU0l5TiJW5f9U0cCHgTpcQ qSPHer1Jr9REGyfGaz/VUQn4Z0hk0bh1mnqDxmB8hNRrhJ82T9E8G3hi1YYwHg0X 5/fEGyBBuWmibxMrMU0D3PMgoQD6YYFJ0z8T7/ID1c3N6JDpIiil/WfiWwaultol KEPkj1aOgpImpX4XSE+SFkPHAIPtelyN79X0Bb2vikHm1pDC5v/CRUjqhsxSCbwm FU2AGlrwXjp2Hk2s89QcfcrsYiWa9AUud6rgq4OGW8ZPHUFsuYSWvinBP0Ly/84= =XEid -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Current thread:
- Hard Drive data security Paul Kurczaba (Sep 30)
- Re: Hard Drive data security Atom 'Smasher' (Sep 30)
- Re: Hard Drive data security Paul O'Malley (Sep 30)
- Re: Hard Drive data security Jonathan Loh (Sep 30)
- Re: Hard Drive data security Zachary Shay (Sep 30)