Re: Where is ext2/3 secure delete ("s") attribute?

[Jesse Pollard <pollard@admin.navo.hpc.mil>]

On Thursday 21 November 2002 07:22 pm, Albert D. Cahalan wrote:
> Alan Cox writes:
> > On Thu, 2002-11-21 at 19:05, Kent Borg wrote:
> >> Another example of why this needs to be done in the file system.  (And
> >> that help is sometimes needed from the "disk" particularly in cases
> >> like flash IDE rives.)
> >
> > The file system can't do it
> > The flash device won't give you the info to do it
> > The ide disk wont give you the info to do it
>
> That's being an idealist. You can protect against everybody
> except the NSA and the disk manufacturer. Most likely they'd
> need to spend lots of money in a clean room to get your data.

incomplete list....
	NSA
	DoD
	Homeland Defense gestapo
	disk manufacturer
	anybody willing to spend about $1000-$5000.

And I'm not sure it is impossible to just reset the bad block list either.
I've been able to do that to SCSI drives in the past, so I think it is
still possible to do.
	
> Forget the shred program. It's less useful than having the
> filesystem simply zero the blocks, because it's slow and you
> can't be sure to hit the OS-visible blocks. Aside from encryption,
> the useful options are:
>
> 1. plain old rm  (protect from users)
> 2. filesystem clears the blocks  (protect from root/kernel)
> 3. physically destroy the disk  (protect from NSA & manufacturer)

-- 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jesse I Pollard, II
Email: pollard@navo.hpc.mil

Any opinions expressed are solely my own.