From owner-freebsd-security Thu Nov 18 21:50:24 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-security@freebsd.org Received: from ind.alcatel.com (postal.xylan.com [208.8.0.248]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5F252156D0; Thu, 18 Nov 1999 21:50:13 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from wes@softweyr.com) Received: from mailhub.xylan.com (mailhub [198.206.181.70]) by ind.alcatel.com (8.9.3+Sun/8.9.1 (ind.alcatel.com 3.0 [OUT])) with SMTP id VAA26417; Thu, 18 Nov 1999 21:49:11 -0800 (PST) X-Origination-Site: Received: from omni.xylan.com by mailhub.xylan.com (SMI-8.6/SMI-SVR4 (mailhub 2.1 [HUB])) id VAA00835; Thu, 18 Nov 1999 21:49:11 -0800 Received: from softweyr.com ([204.68.178.39]) by omni.xylan.com (4.1/SMI-4.1 (xylan engr [SPOOL])) id AA17809; Thu, 18 Nov 99 21:49:08 PST Message-Id: <3834E4D1.F1B3EC6B@softweyr.com> Date: Thu, 18 Nov 1999 22:49:05 -0700 From: Wes Peters Organization: Softweyr LLC X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en] (X11; U; FreeBSD 3.1-RELEASE i386) X-Accept-Language: en Mime-Version: 1.0 To: trouble@netquick.net Cc: Barrett Richardson , David G Andersen , freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-security@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: secure filesystem wiping References: <38347544.3D50A536@softweyr.com> <3834785B.D1A99603@netquick.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-security@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org TrouBle wrote: > > will you all take a look at this, this is what i am looking for!! > > Wipe is a tool that effectively degauses the surface of a hard > disk, making it virtually impossible to retrieve the data that was > stored on it. This is the ultimate in making sure secure data that is > erased from a hard drive is unrecoverable. OK, I just looked at it. I don't see where it differs greatly from obliterate. In particular, nothing about the manpage or the code suggests that it will do what you suggest, background wiping of free sectors on a mounted filesystem. On the contrary, it appears that is has some special code introduced for handling block devices that seem to be unnecessary, given that block devices are (soon to be) no longer found in FreeBSD. I agree that the ability to securely overwrite disk sectors before returning them to the free pool is an excellent idea, but this tool does not appear to provide such a feature. When the original discussion that lead to my rather simple obliterate program occurred, Matt Dillon and others pointed out the way to really do this would be to integrate the disk sector wiping into the VM system. While I agree this sounds like an excellent feature, I am not going to be able to do that anytime in the foreseeable future. If someone else wants to work on this, feel free to use any part of the code I've written, it's under a Berkeley-style "copycenter" license after all. ;^) -- "Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?" Wes Peters Softweyr LLC wes@softweyr.com http://softweyr.com/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-security" in the body of the message