Subject: Re: softdep?
To: Ignatios Souvatzis <is@jocelyn.rhein.de>
From: Bill Sommerfeld <sommerfeld@orchard.arlington.ma.us>
List: current-users
Date: 03/25/1999 16:03:36
Well, yeah, `rm -P' doesn't work too well on LFS; however, see Peter
Guttman's paper on secure deletion:

     http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html

He suggests something like 43 passes of overwriting with random data
and specific bit patterns designed to exploit properties of MFM and
RLL encodings.  rm -P doesn't do anywhere near that much...

LFS may actually be better in some ways in terms of guarding against
recovery of overwritten data from scrubbed disks since it keeps moving
the data around in an active filesystem.  (Apparently one of the
things which aids recovery is how long a given bit has held a
particular value..)


						- Bill