UGN Security
Posted By: §intå× Anyone who ever wiped thier hard drive - 06/18/04 07:06 AM
Ever wonder who the hell Peter Gutmann(35 passes) is. Here is his paper which made that standard. BTW this is no longer needed or dosen't work as well. Drives do not store data this way any more.

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html
Posted By: §intå× Re: Anyone who ever wiped thier hard drive - 06/18/04 08:47 AM
Peter Gutmann's Epilogue some time after 1996 and before 2002

Quote:

In the time since this paper was published, some people have treated
the 35-pass overwrite technique described in it more as a kind of voodoo
incantation to banish evil spirits than the result of a technical
analysis of drive encoding techniques. As a result, they advocate
applying the voodoo to PRML and EPRML drives even though it will have no
more effect than a simple scrubbing with random data. In fact performing
the full 35-pass overwrite is pointless for any drive since it targets a
blend of scenarios involving all types of (normally-used) encoding
technology, which covers everything back to 30+-year-old MFM methods (if
you don't understand that statement, re-read the paper). If you're using
a drive which uses encoding technology X, you only need to perform the
passes specific to X, and you never need to perform all 35 passes. For
any modern PRML/EPRML drive, a few passes of random scrubbing is the best
you can do. As the paper says, "A good scrubbing with random data will do
about as well as can be expected". This was true in 1996, and is still
true now.
Dose anyone understand all of this. I am missing bits. Some of it is over my head.
Posted By: Gremelin Re: Anyone who ever wiped thier hard drive - 06/18/04 08:49 AM
'eh Jetico has a program called BestCrypt which does random writes of data and purges it; i've used it for years and doubt i'd use anything else.
Posted By: §intå× Re: Anyone who ever wiped thier hard drive - 06/19/04 08:42 PM
BestCrypt wipes? I have used Bcwipe from them. Pretty nice. I have not been able to recover what I wiped. I have looked a BestCrypt but thought it was just to encrypt your hd.
Posted By: Gremelin Re: Anyone who ever wiped thier hard drive - 06/19/04 09:48 PM
BCWipe used to come with BestCrypt. BestCrypt also doesn't encrypt your hard drive; it makes an encrypted container which acts like a virtual drive that's encrypted; it's really cool if you get a chance to play with it...
© UGN Security Forum