Re: Secure deletion

Tom Vier (nester@sekurity.org)
Thu, 23 Jul 1998 15:16:52 -0400 (EDT)


> > Does ext2 support secure deletion (freed blocks are overwritten, possibly
> > multiple times) rather than just released for reuse? Are there patches available to do this?
>
> It was supported in 1.2 I think, but got lost somewhere between 1.3 and 2.0
> during the MM changes.
>
> I would just use a user space utility to do it - in Linux that's
> straight-forward because ext2 doesn't suffer from the staying-tail
> problem DOS FAT has (except when you use ftruncate()). Of course you
> have to make sure too that the sensitive data doesn't stay on the swap
> partition.

what's wrong w/ using ftruncate? i've been using it after wipe passes
to make it a little harder to get the file size. oh, did you mean how
you can't find stray parts of the file if anothe program truncated it
at some point?

--
Tom Vier - 0x82B007A8    | Hate Micro$hit, AOLame, and Untel?
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