[H-GEN] dd or shred for secure deletes.

[David Seikel]

On Mon, 28 Nov 2005 20:29:43 -0800 (PST) Anthony Irwin
<irwa82 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> So I was wondering if anyone knows the difference between the dd and
> shred methods of deleting files and hard drives and what the best way
> is.

I don't know about shred, but I have used Darik's Boot and Nuke
http://dban.sourceforge.net/ in the past.  They have a decent
explanation of the various methods used to wipe data.  As with all
security related stuff it boils down to a trade-off between how much
resources your opponent is willing to throw at the problem and how much
you are.  At one end of the spectrum, simply writing zero to all bytes
on a hard drive will probably stop me from retrieving the data, but at
the other end of the spectrum, the NSA will have no problems reading
that hard drive if they want to.

When it came to wiping the data on some HUMBUG drives we let Darik's
Boot and Nuke run for two solid days using one of it's more secure
algorithms.  This was probably overkill, but it pays to be a little bit
paranoid in security work.
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