Peter Nosko wrote:
>
> Since this group is interested in security, I thought someone here might
> know of this. I'm looking for a utility to securely wipe the contents of an
> entire hard drive.
There was a long discussion of this on the FORENSICS list at
http://www.securityfocus.com/ . There are several things to note:
* DoD specifications require a multi-pass write; I think the Gutmann
method requires 35 passes - this clears out any "magnetic residue" from
the drive
* Using a single character (like 0x00) doesn't adequately erase the
drive
* Using alternating characters is better; one person suggested
alternating between /dev/zero and /dev/urandom as sources (using dd).
* The definitive work in this area is at
http://wipe.sourceforge.net/secure_del.html
* The only way to be absolutely sure no information remains is an actual
destruction of the drive (my favorite would be putting the platters in
an acid bath).
Given the suggestion of one poster, I followed up with this suggested
shell fragment and shell script:
...to write to the disk, using /dev/zero and /dev/urandom...
#!/bin/sh
ITER=5
DEV=/dev/hda
for i in seq 1 $ITER ; do
dd if=/dev/zero of=$DEV
dd if=/dev/urandom of=$DEV
done
...to write any value...
( while true; do echo -n "$VAL" ; done ) | dd if=- of=/dev/hda
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