Given that you work for the Military, I'd recommend that you have a talk to your local IT people about what they recommend. No doubt they'd have quite stringent rules and regulations for disposing of storage devices that held sensitive information. That's if you are using this drive to transfer information between work and home! In which case I'd hope it was all encrypted as well! However if it's just your own personal hard-drive (that's never held sensitive Air Force information) then running "dd i=/dev/urandom o=/dev/sda" a few times would probably do it. Having said that, I read once that hi-tech hardware data recovery devices can still retrieve "old" information from a hard-drive from its lingering magnetic imprint even AFTER its been wiped over with new data. But those devices are probably only routinely employed by foreign governments, competitors engaging in industrial esponiage and of course data retrievel specialists :)
-----Original Message----- From: Baenen Eric P Contr AFRL/HEC [mailto:Eric.Baenen@wpafb.af.mil] Sent: Tuesday, 26 April 2005 2:25 a.m. To: Suse-Security List (E-mail) Subject: [suse-security] Securely wiping external usb hard drive
List members,
I'm running SUSE 9.2 Pro... can anyone recommend an app or technique for securely wiping the contents on an external usb hard drive with a single 120GB reiserfs partition?
- unfortunately because of the case design - cracking the case and removing the drive so it can be connected directly to an IDE controller is not an option
- fdisk'ing the drive, just wiping the partition table, reformating, etc. are not sufficient - I need an option that will make the drive's current contents reasonably unrecoverable
- it's been suggested that I repeatedly do "dd i=/dev/urandom o=/dev/sda && dd i=/dev/zero o=/dev/sda" - and I will do this if necessary - but would rather not take the days that this is likely to take
- it's also been suggested to use 'shred' - however, in the man pages for shred is says that because of the redundancies and protections built into the Reiser filesystem - that shed will not truely and securely wipe the files - there is a reasonable chance of recovery after shreddig files on Reiser
Thanks,
Eric
Eric Baenen Program Manager - Scientific Network Environments General Dynamics - Advanced Information Systems
Phone: 937-255-8180 FAX: 937-255-8845 2255 H Street (AFRL/HEC) Area B Bldg 248 Rm 108 Wright Patterson AFB, OH 45433