wipe utility

[gaf at blu.org (Jerry Feldman)]

On Wed, 18 Aug 2004 19:22:54 -0400
christoph at linuxsoup.com wrote:

> I am just catching up on some email, but this thread caught my
> interest. I have looked into the ext3 code or read any of the papers,
> but I was always under the impression that the filesystem journal only
> stored a bitmask (table) of modified blocks.  There shouldn't be any
> data in there.

For the most part, you should only be concerned about the data.  It
depends on how clean you want to make it. If you want to wipe a drive or
partition then the filesystem makes no difference, but on Linux and Unix
systems you probably want to wipe the swap area too. I found the
following online. 

This is a Usenix paper on the subject:
http://wipe.sourceforge.net/secure_del.html

These are products:
http://www.r-wipe.com/
http://www.jetico.com/
http://www.dtidata.com/products_disk_wipe.asp

Note that the man page for shred(1) contains some caveats on journals. 


-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9
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