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Subject:Re: Consequences of not really understanding From:Sandy Harris <sandy -at- storm -dot- ca> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Mon, 17 Dec 2001 13:52:15 -0500
Stan Schwartz wrote:
>
> >Here in the UK, the Navy have such faith in the technology for wiping
> >hard drives that on one job I did in the 80s they paid to have the
> >drives smashed with a large hammer when the job was done :-)
There actually is a US DOD standard for wiping drives. I once had a copy,
and wrote a C program that implemented it for single files.
That standard is only applied for some security levels. Higher levels
require physical destruction of the drive.
> With the right software and patience, data can be recovered, intact,
> after three overwrites.
Among other things, it has a Usenix paper of his that is the standard
reference on such data recovery, papers pointing out flaws in Norton
file encryption, and an enormous collection of crypto links.
> The more regular the overwrite pattern
> (10101010... as opposed to something more 'random' like 28472849...)
> the easier it is to filter out.
The standard I saw required at least three overwrites. one with all-1s,
one all 0s, one with random data. That is not enough to stop Gutmann's
attacks, but I read that standard years ago and it may have changed.
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