On 6/30/2003 at 7:53 PM isox wrote:
>There is a good paper written by Peter Gutmann titled "Secure Deletion
of
>Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory". It is nearly a decade
old,
>but it contains some very good information in it. It is available at
>http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html
Guttman's paper is probably the best known and most quoted on this
topic and it may be the basis for the 30+ overwrites recommended by
some misguided security "experts". I have to wonder if said experts
have even read the paper (or understood what they were reading) since
the paper is largely irrelevant and does *not* recommend a large number
of overwrites.
There are two problems with Guttman's paper. First, he treats the
recovery of overwritten data as an easy task. This is simply untrue, if
it were easy, the service would be readily available. Nonetheless, it
would seem that many read this and accept it as fact.
The other problem is that a large part of the paper is devoted to a
discussion about patterns and number of overwrites for MFM and RLL
technology. MFM and RLL disks were obsolete when the paper was
presented nine years ago. The topic was an irrelevant, academic
exercise then and it is even more stale today.
In the paper's epilog, Guttman himself, the self-proclaimed
"Professional Paranoid", writes, "...some people have treated the
35-pass overwrite technique as a kind of voodoo incantation to banish
evil spirits... For any modern PRML/ERML drive, a few passes of random
scrubbing is the best you can do."
Jack Crone
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