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A New Technique to Quickly Erase Hard Drives
RockDoctor writes "Stories about 'wiped' hard drives appearing on eBay (and other channels) and being stuffed with personably-identifiable data are legion; rarer are spy planes having to land on enemy territory, but it happened in 2001 to a US spy plane over an un-declared enemy (China, and that's a topic in itself). Dark Reading reports the development of a technique to securely wipe a hard drive in seconds, and which is safe for flying. (The safe for flying criterion rules out things like fun with packing the drives in thermite. Also thermiting the drives may not erase the platters to the standard required, which is moderately interesting itself."
Is it more effective than wiping HDD using powerful magnets?
can be rendered inoperable in seconds - the method's name is "slashdotting".
How curious that the anti-bot please-type-in-this-word word is kilobyte for this post.
Unfortunately a few passes with random data is not as effective against a sophisticated recovery effort as is often assumed.
_ del.html
Now if it's just some random joe with an undelete program he got for $19.99 at the local shop then a single pass is often enough, more sophisticated software only tools might get past a few, but with hardware equipment (probably not used often below the fbi/pro forensics places) you might want to do something a bit more secure.
With good knowledge of how the data is actually stored on the disk you can figure out patterns that tend to degausse the bits being wiped and help eleminate the residual images left by the micro imperfection in head positioning (which are shrinking to almost nothing these days) and simular effects a trully sophisticated data recovery effort might use.
Peter Gutman put out a paper about this that can be read at http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure
that explains it better.
Though with remapping and newer recording techniques things change and software only erasure becomes more and more problematic. At the highest levels of secrecy I believe most governments require over-kill levels of outright hardware destruction.
What 'standard' required? Are you trying to tell me that you might be able to read some data from the molten aluminium?
Windows has detected an undetectable error.
Dozens of prank hard drive erasing have occurred within the Georgia Institute of Technology's nerd population. This was preceded by large orders of extremely powerful magnets. When questioned, the victims only had this to say:
"Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan!"
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
When I need to protect my data from spying eyes I secure a 500m sata cable into the back port and slowly, very carefully; feed the hard drive into the event horizon. Giving it a good yank after a few minutes and reeling it back in.. the drive returns to normal working condition afterwards.
Why wasn't the content of the harddrive encrypted?
I think the word that should be there is legend. Or am I just unaware of another definition of legion?
Just use Maxtor harddisk drives, those things destroy themselves all the time!
I've often wondered why the standard is to rewrite over the drive several times. Is dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda unacceptable? Does it leave traces of data?
Wouldn't it be easier to use a flash memory chip? It's unlikely that more than a few GB would be needed. And destroying a flash chip is much easier.
Or, just encrypt the data with the key in RAM. (Linux can already do this with swap - it's completely transparent to the user, and the key only lasts as long as the system remains running).
The Chinese eventually gained access to U.S. military secrets.
What a crock of crap. That and the rest of the story.
I worked in the military long enough to know that they would have encrypted sensitive data as a requirement (destroy or erase a security token, in the use of a combined token/passphrase crypto system and the data is safe) and that the military already use storage devices which can be erased in seconds with a function specifically built just for that.
This story sounds like it is just trying to inject some life into the stock price of some crap company that provides too little, too late.
why not store the entire filesystem on RAM with a battery, in a tmpfs. when you want to wipe it, put a thousand volts through it for a couple of seconds, then cut power?
If this isn't a fluff piece I don't know what is.
"We developed a 125 rare earth magnetic eraser with self contained power source"
Interesting, but adding in this US spy plane angle has got to be simply PR.
I know by itself thermite and similar methods have difficulty penetrating the outer case reliably, but I would think drill+thermite injection to fill the internal cavity of the system would be effective..
Combined with an encryption scheme I would think it virtually impossilbe to recover data if you can reduce the platters to slag reliably..
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
You DO NOT have to overwrite a file 35 times to be "safe". This number originates from a misunderstanding of a paper about secure file erasure, written by Gutmann.
The 35 patterns/passes in the table in the paper are for all different hard disk encodings used in the 90:s. A single drive only use one type of encoding, so the extra passes for another encoding has no effect at all. The 35 passes are maybe useful for drives where the encoding is unknown though.
For new 2000-era drives, simply overwriting with random bytes is sufficient.
Here's an epilogue by Gutmann for the original paper:
...but the prototype is 125lbs and uses materials I don't have access to.
I don't care about a device like this until I can get my hands on one or make one without having to break into a hospital to steal parts.
I did find the bit about the spy plane interesting though.
Seal the HD with a sticker that says reading the content of this HD is prohibited by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. That will show them! :)
It depends on the type of magnetic field used and how it's applied. If you just put a drive platter (or magnetic tape, or floppy disk) into a static magnetic field, you might bend the platters or disturb the media, without actually destroying the data itself.
I'm most familiar with procedures for erasing magnetic tape than hard drives. The conventional method that I was always taught was to put the tape very close to source of a strong alternating electromagnetic field (so easy way is to just have a small coil hooked up to the wall socket). Then -- and this is the important part -- you move the media away from the coil, while the coil is still operating. So it goes from the near field out to where the field is basically no longer having any effect, but without the field going off. The result is that different layers of the media end up with different magnetic fields: as the media moves further and further away from the coil, the field is no longer able to saturate the center of it, so it's left with a certain state. The material just next to that gets left with a different state, because by then the coil's field has changed directions. So you end up with different magnetic states (polarizations) being written to the media both in the depth direction, and lengthwise (as you pull the tape along past the coil). I guess the thickness of the "stripes" would depend on characteristics of the media, plus the frequency of the coil's field and the speed with which the media was moving past it. I just always moved it slowly away at a few inches per second, personally.
Just holding the media next to a magnet, even an AC electromagnet, and turning the magnet on and off, doesn't erase the data as effectively as moving the media from close to the coil to far away. Or at least that's what I was always told. I suppose if you had a circuit that powered down the coil slowly, it would have much the same effect.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
If thermite doesn't do a good job, go one better and make the platters out of thermite. Make the motor axle out of magnesium, add a fuse and you're set.
If the burning is a problem, just make the platters from cheddar cheese, and add a mouse in a cage adjacent to the drive. Open the hatch, and problem is solved.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Normally the hard drives just go into a grinder or furnace. Sure, that won't suit an airplane, but neither will a bulky magnetic device that weighs 125 pounds per hard drive. (can't just have one because the drive has to slide right in)
The obvious solution: encrypt everything that hits the disk, keep the key in RAM, and overwrite the key when needed.
I'd worry the most about antenna shapes and sizes and various analog circuitry.
War planes are supposed to fly in ... well, war. And in war, people shoot at you. Now, if you happen to live in an area where brownouts happen, you know what even a minimal power outage does to your system. The data on the HD, however, stays ok. So, during a stress situation where power fails for a moment, the plane system may be shot, but it can notice this and reboot to a stable state (this is done by MAGNITUDES faster than on your Windows box, btw). This is not an option if the system itself is stored in volatile memory. One power outage and the whole electric on the plane is dead.
Also, it's often time consuming to prepare the flight plan for a plane from scratch. Often, it is much easier to take the old plan and alter it, give it new coordinates and parameters. Also, you could not "prep and set" a plane before flight, you'd have to do it just as the plane is about to take off, or you have to keep the system up and running and supervised all the time from programming to takeoff. This is often not really doable.
I can see flash ram, which has other problems (with stability and reliability most of all), but volatile ram is definitly out.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Load an unpatched copy of XP to it, then hook it straight to a T3 line.
Nobody is going to stir the molten aluminum. Nobody is going to make sure the whole thing melts, including all the edges.
A budget equivalant to many billion dollars can support a rather large and dedicated team of geniuses. Getting the info from a partly melted platter sounds like a fun challenge.
Aren't they specialized drives anyways? Couldn't they just get the company that makes these drives add an internal shredder+heat source? Like a mini car compacter that then puts voltage through the whole thing. Hell you could probably do it so it if the wrong encryption key is entered, the drive self destructs. Alternate solution. Put the drives in a raid. Throw one of the drives OUT OF THE AIRPLANE. Destroy the other.
Both M-Systems and Memtech have solid state disk drives that implement NSA and NISPOM approved methods for secure hard drive erase - and they can erase the entire drive in under a minute -
And in further news, Georgia Tech scientists have designed a printer with an integral shredder that shreds all output continuously as it is printed.
They have also designed a novel camera which, instead of a digital CCD array, uses a tough, thin strip of polyester polymer coated with a chemical, light-sensitive substrate. Intended for spy applications, if caught the captured images can be destroyed in seconds simply by opening the back of the camera.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Store the data on the disk encrypted and the key in RAM. In case of emergency erase the chip and the data becomes worthless. I wouldn't trust a system that has to operate or where the pilot has to be conscious.
But if you're on a spy plane, wouldn't you have the enemies military secrets?
This is slightly offtopic, but I'm at a loss as for what to do. About 8 months ago I wrote zeros in one pass to an 80gb WD drive using the Western Digital Data Lifeguard tools. After trying numerous software programs, and a local "recovery" center (mom and pop operation), I have set the drive in my closet to remain untouched until I can find some way to recover the data, and afford that recovery. Reading http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_ del.html gave me some hope that this is quite possible.
Does anyone know a recovery center that can do this (anywhere, I am willing to mail the drive)? How much can I expect to pay for something like this? Is there any software out there that could potentially help me?
Please let me know if there's a better forum or place to ask this question. Thanks!
... by overwriting twice with random data will destroy any data beyond recovery. You can't use special things to read residual magnetic data off the platters, unless you're habitually using 25-year-old hard disks. Modern drives use very complicated modulation schemes, unlike old MFM drives.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
1: Drill hole in HDD case
2: Pack HDD with C4
3: insert and ignite fuse
4: drop HDD from plane by any means possible, preferably over an ocean
5: watch things explode
6: profit.
Use symmetric key encryption to encode all the data on the disk. In a few redundant locations on the disk store the key and have the disk driver use these to decode and encode data written to the disk. When you want to quickly "erase" all the data on the disk, overwrite the keys n-times with the random data to make all the data on the disk unreadable.
It would be better to make the platters out of peanut butter. Mice don't like cheese as much as you think.
What the **** is the US government doing violating Chinese airspace without permission or clearance?
This is an act of war.
Those pilots should be tried as war criminals and summarily shot for being party to start an international conflict.
Compromosing NO FLY ZONES was the same excuse the US gave for invading Bagdad. I think the Chinese should take Los Angeles and San Fransisco... its sitting right there on the coast, just ripe and ready for the taking. Half of them practically built it in the old western times, it belongs to them. Or give it back to the Indians.
Carry around a HugeAssMagnet? just let me pull that out of my back pocket....
Ok, the best idea is to assume that the harddrive will be recovered if anything left is found, so I encrypt the harddrive. Now where do I put the key? I'm not typeing in some huge pass just cause my server has to reboot. Dynamic ram can be recovers by examining the oxide layer even after the power is pulled, flash of course stays for a long time, and I can't find anywhere that sells an sram key storage device that can be zerolized. If there isn't such a device that can be reasonabley hooked up to the computer... if not anyone have an idea for a microcontroler that has enough computing power to use public key crypto, amtel only sells their secret squirl stuff to well, i guess it's a secret. I know that the tpm module in future systems is suposed to fix all of this, but the master key is wonkey and comes with stuff already on it from factory. (read as big brother) I'm sure that any sized fpga could to wonders, but that's beyond me to figure out, I was planing a mostly copy-n-paste app in c for some micro cause crypto isn't secure till it's stood up to years worth of atemted atacks. I'd be more that happy to place such and experiment in the public, excluding (hate to admit USA exports).
In recent survay, Jack Danials beats Gramernatzies, at 3 to 2 odds.
I think I just cashed out all my cool points.
Does anybody remember Munga Bunga's Hard Drive Killer Pro? It supposedly would wipe a drive in seconds to an unrecoverable state. http://www.hackology.com/programs/hdkp/ginfo.shtml Perfect for when the FBI or other law enforcement agency comes knocking at your door.
Now the RIAA/MPAA/FUD are going to demand that such a device be put into every possible digital recording device.
Attempt to copy a protected product and BAM, your hard drive is toast.
If it doesn't involve fire arm in some way, it's not secure.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
use a final fantasy cart to store the data,and then DON`T hold reset while turning the power off :3
The point of doing this is this would be so the "enemy" can't find out what you know about them.
But if you erase all your data, then they'll know how much data you have: nothing.
It's like a catch-22.
(:P)
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
Plus, some people have called into question a lot of the sources used in that paper. It seems that some of the sources don't even exist.
This is especially usefull for drives using glass platters.
They used a magnetic force microscope to map even the smallest magnetic domains on the surface of an erased disk drive to ensure that the patterns found there were completely random.
So after they passed the test drive through a very strong magnetic field the data was random? Wouldn't it be in a pattern to match the field??
With all due respect, the article doesn't describe the device as you say. It weighs 125 lbs in prototype form, which will be reduced for production, and there's only one needed per airplane, not one per drive. What they're proposing is much less bulky than a similarly useful grinder or furnace. After all, it has to be usable on many packaged drives, quickly, in emergency plane-crash conditions. In a previous life, I did some work for E-Systems on a spy plane (Rivet Joint) using big removable ESDI drives of a few hundred megabytes each capacity, and the project guy said that it took about 20 minutes for their emergency drive erase sequence to finish. Not good if you're going down in enemy airspace!
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
GP probably meant by 'powerful' magnets the kind you can get at scientific supplies shops, or even (in slightly less powerful degree) at ThinkGeek.
The 'powerful' in the article refers to the power akin to an MRI scanner. Ever see that video of somebody holding a scissor on a string several feet away from the aperture, and the scissor points straight to it with some duress on the holder's finger from the string when the MRI is on?
Suffice to say that nobody in a home/office environment is going to have one those 'powerful' magnets laying around.
Me - I settled for "Darik's Boot and Nuke" as part of the Eraser program to wipe two old computers, and will again for a third shortly. They never had highly classified or particularly sensitive information - just stopping the casual users from retrieving old porn. I hate porn pirates.
Now, even assuming there's something remaining after thermite, how do you get it out of a molten platter? The head hovers at nanometers from the disk's surface. A bent disk with a huge hole through it will just instantly wreck any head trying to read it. Is it even technically possible to restore the platter to a condition where you can even try to read anything from it?
Besides, shouldn't all the data vanish due to the reaction bringing the surface above the Curie temperature?
Well, none of us will be able to afford this. Regarding the Chinese incident: That plane should have never been allowed by our gov't to land on a Chinese base, even if it meant it was shot down and started a war. Bush & co. will never stand up to anyone who poses even a minor threat. I can't believe Bush got off so easily on this MAJOR incident.
Degaussers are nothing new. But there is no need to use them. Encryption does the trick as well. Just erase the key securely and you are done. If the device that the disk is installed in does not support encryption, then develop a module that sits between disk and device and encrypt on that. Attach a switch that triggers key erasure.
There is a second problem with degaussers: You have to physically remove the disks from their housing. That may take more than minutes.
And there is a third problem with degaussers: You have to very carefully check they work with each device they are to be used on. For example, older degaussers do fine for older disks, but are completely useless for modern ones.
And a 4th problem: Degaussers do not work at all for solid-state disks. Since they are not that uncommon in military application and actually may look the same, that seems to be a serious problem. One that encryption does not have.
I see one advantage for the permanent-magnet solution in military application: It works without power. But if you use the encryption-in-the-cable approach I described above, you can keep the key in a battery-buffered memory chip and erase that securely using the power of the battery (not quite as simple as it sounds, but it is possible to do). All in all, this mainly seems to be a scheme to sell the military something expensive.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Go buy a nice 3" diameter 1" thick n50 Neodymium-boron magnet. Condiering it's strong enough to attract steel pots and pans from ten to twenty feet away, just setting one of these bad boys on a hard drive will almost 100% efectively wipe it the fuck out, not to mention most likely fuck up the heads on the drive, making it totally useless.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
If the data on the HDD was encryptyed using appropriate algorythms and a strong enough key, then the data would be safe without the need to erase it. Depending on the operating system used, and presence or absence of a swap file, there may be a few details to resolve, but nothing insoluble. It would be possible to create an encryption system that relies on a time sensitive key transmitted from a base station (using some kind of challenge response method) and easily disabled from the base station when necessary.
that can be powered off when the situation calls for it. Problem solved.
it happened in 2001 to a US spy plane over an un-declared enemy (China, and that's a topic in itself).
This is offtopic, although a more interesting topic than "wiping data", but the plane itself was over international waters and never over China's territory.
Also, since when does spying require a declaration of war? The whole point of spying is to aid in deciding-the-need-for or course-of preemptive actions. Given the Chinese government's penchant for secrecy and censorship, it seems fair to want to keep an eye on them. The same point can be made about spying on any other country... everyone knowing what everyone else is doing has a stabalizing affect. All bad decisions are made in fear, which brought on by ignorance, and governments, whose decisions affect millions, need all the tools possible to make correctly informed decisions.
"a technique to securely wipe a hard drive in seconds, and which is safe for flying" You mean throwing it out of your window?
Kaetemi
We don't need any pansy thermite or amazingly powerful magnets to prevent the enemy from reading the data, just store it on a write only device.
"Oh boy"
Good trade relations with the United States are critical to the party's survival. If western markets became inaccessible and foreign capital fled, growth would falter, internal tensions would mount and the legitimacy of the party would soon be questioned. In any case, a global hyperpower can do just about anything it wants: weaker states must submit to its overwhelming might. And none of these rulers seek justification in your eyes.
The pilot of the plane lives near me. He's recently running for Nebraska State Treasurer. While he should have faced a court marshall when he returned to the US. CNN made him a hero for "saving his crew" when his orders would have been to crash the plane at that point. Obviously he was on spy mission, and he turned over top secret information by not being able to destroy it, just to save his own neck. If they wanted to contents of the harddisk, let'em recover it from the bottom of the ocean.
Is it just me, or isn't this just a fancier form of an external CRT degausser used to correct chronic magnetic drift that have been used for decades? Hardly what you'd call "new" technology, since these devices have been used for this exact purpose in the past.
8==8 Bones 8==8
China may have different attitudes and morals standards than the US, but they are doing many things right as well; more than western media tends to portray (e.g. according to the CIA world factbook China has a lower percentage of citizens suffering from poverty than the richest country in the world (namely the US)). I don't want to whitewash anything, but reading things like "undeclared enemy" in a tech article on an international website just pisses me off.
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
It shouldn't be too hard to come up with a chemical-erasure system that's built into the drive:
Electric charge breaks seal holding chemical, chemical spills over platters, platters destroyed.
This plus very strong encryption should meet anyone's data-destruction needs. If done right a 1"-platter drive can probably fit into a laptop.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
It's a bulk eraser for hard drives, and it weighs 125 pounds. Put drive in slot, turn crank. That's a very special-purpose product. Especially since it will erase the alignment tracks, too, so it's strictly for destroying a drive, not for prepping one for reuse.
1. Take the drive that needs to be failsafed and placed into a box lined with bullet-proof material.
2. Mount my patented Bango Drive Destroyer on the drive.
3. When the time comes, press the Bango Button! causing two 30 carbine slugs to fire through the drive case shattering the platters into Zillions and Zillions of pieces.
4. Profit!
Jeeze! is it THAT difficult to engineer?
Later,
I don't like big words..., does that make me anti-semantic?
Why not just throw the thing into an industrial shredder and then throw the remains into the shredder again a few times and then grind up those remains? I don't think you could get much if you reduce the drive to powder.
> ...undeclared enemy (which is China, and that's a topic in itself).
China is not an enemy. We buy a ton of stuff from them. They buy a ton of stuff from us. Our businesses have offices there. Our colleges have exchange programs with them.
Yeah, our diplomatic relations are a little bit strained over things like Taiwan, but we're nowhere near going to war with them. If you're a troll, shame on you. In any case, shame on the Slashdot editors for choosing this ignorant or trolling person's story.
vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.
"rarer are spy planes having to land on enemy territory" I'd sure hope so!
Sure, they say they will get the weight down. OK, maybe they cut it in half.
They do need one device per drive. You missed the part about the drive being automatically pulled into the device, and the part about a twist handle as a backup.
In other words, this is a drive enclosure. The drive sits in the safe part of the enclosure most of the time, connected to a destruction actuator. Nobody is going to be running around the airplane yanking out drives.
Probably a few drives could go into a mechanically complicated (less reliable) shared enclosure. Doing everything that way is no good. Equipment may come from different suppliers, with different technology. Think of a flying datacenter with rackmount systems from a variety of different vendors. (the prime contractor has to make it all fit, but isn't supposed to do a custom redesign of every subcontractor's computer) Also you have the matter of ongoing upgrades.
Man, I haven't encountered such a poorly written submission in a while, and I've been here a while, that's a story all in itself! There were so many digressions the point was long lost (but that's a story in itself!)
Either they'll smash upon landing or attach a grenade to the stuff and activate it as your throw it out the window. That's another option if you ask me and they American's flying over the water could have tossed their gear into the ocean before landing. We must have subs and battle groups that could recover it if we were that worried.
Just my $.02.
--- RFC 1149 Compliant.
The US aircraft alluded to was a US Navy EP-3E Aries II, a slow four-engined turboprop plane based on a passenger airliner. It's a surveillance aircraft, not a spy plane. It's out in the open, in international airspace (usually), and a modern military will immediately pick up on where it is and what it's doing. It's completely dependent on international treaties to not get shot down by whoever it's checking out. A SR-71 or U-2 on a secrete high-altitude flight over a hostile nation it isn't.
Hover a neodymium magnet over the drive as it spins (not too close or you'll bend the arms). Format then write an image containing canardal information. Then do multiple passes with random data. Nothing would gratify me more than a million dollar recovery to get bayesian junk.
umm... so the solution to fast hard disk erasure is Magneto. :)
Interesting...
small explosive charge inside should do it - if not 100% add encryption as well between the 2 that should do it.
125 lbs' worth of equipment to securely scramble a hard drive? Let me guess, the contractor is going to spend time "miniaturizing" it and charge several hundred grand per unit, right?
I have a solution, with the total weight being under 5 lbs and total cost being under $130 (not counting any logic/switching required to enable it).
Keep in mind:
- the aircraft is disabled
- flight instrument interference is a non-issue
- The HDD not only does not have to be usable, it is intended to be unusable after this process
- 12V, 24V, and 48V taps should all be readily available in the aircraft (NiMH batteries would suffice)
Ready?
Here are the required components:
- a heavy-duty consumer-level inverter costing under $100 in bulk
- a Radio Trash (or generic) degausser costing well under $30 in bulk.
Total weight: under 5 lbs. Renders a hard drive unusable in a couple of seconds.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Unless the enemy finds the pad.
"Possibility"? Try "risk of quantum computing taking off" to see national security's side of the story. Or try "keys falling into the wrong hands" as above.
Wow, using a magnet. Genius! Who would have ever thought of a magnet to scramble the bits on a magnetic disc platter? I mean, it simply makes no sense. I don't believe it's possible. Can someone please verify whether or not this is actually the case because I just can't believe a magnet would wipe out a platter. No way.
such as transparent hardware disk encryption combined with software encryption at boot. If the RPV goes down, the software encryption only can be unlocked and the OS running when the password is entered. Of course, the hardware key needs to be present for the hardware system to even get to the software login. If the plane goes down and they can signal a destruct, that key wrapped in a little bit of explosives gets blown to technoconfetti, and the encryption controller card as well for good measure. Now how is anyone going to DOUBLE decrypt the harddrive? By the time China or anyone else did, it would be a couple of centuries later and irrellevant. The point of information security is to play keep away long enough for it to no longer be of any value and superceeded by newer more imporant information.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
No, the loop is indistinguishable from an infinite loop not because of a syntax error (about which gcc -Wall would warn the developer) but because it requires more energy to halt than is available in this universe.
i knew an older geek who keep his data on spools of cdrs, he would fill the hollow with gun powder and a blasting cap which was wired into his alarm system. if someone tried to forebly gain entry into his building it destroyed the disks,.. well fragmented them in such a way that a defrag(haha) would be dificult.
i was never able to determine why he was so paranoid...
if he was a leet haxor he would have left the country right?
Data on Flash memory (e.g. usb drives) has a tendancy to burn in. The longer it's in there the more it burns in. There's no real way to counter this. The only way to theoretically wipe it is to do several passes each a few weeks apart.
So you'd have to really completeley destroy the drive. which basically means something like thermite, which, as the submitter mentioned, is unsuitable for aircrafts.
Everytime I hear of the milatary using these (and losing them, which they seem to do regularly), it pisses me off. They must have had an IT guy telling to never use that stuff, and to encrypt their data. For some reason the higher ups just seem to not get the point, and they still use it, and leave them behind in their rented cars.
I do love "!" but not as much as I love "..."...
Image of drive-wiping device
Table-ized A.I.
I think IBM/Hitachi drives do it better!
Someone mod this guy up. I love dry humor!
Either RockDoctor is ignorant of the fact that the plane was over iternational waters when the Chinese harassed it or he's intentionally lying about what happened. Regardless of which way RockDoctor's error occurred, CowboyNeal is to blame for posting the misinformation.
/. a party to the lie/error.
If CowboyNeal had any integrity, he'd post an update clarifying that the plane was in internatonal airpsace when the incident occurred. To ignore the lie/error makes
I would think that would work fine for wiping a harddrive.
Then again, it seems that also means they need us more than we need them which should make them friends indeed.
If I needed to destroy a the data on a drive in seconds I would simply heat it well above the curie temperature for the magnetic material being used. If you are feeling really paranoid add a variable field strength magnet as well - once above the curie temperature you wouldn't need much of a magnet to make sure things were well scrambled.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
It is so annoying to see discussions of easy ways to wipe data from a HD. There's already a way to do it which is easy, almost instant, safe, etc. All you do is you have an encryption key stored in a little bit of ROM in the drive. Every time it writes or reads a block, it uses that encryption key. There is also an electrical connector, with two electrodes on the sides of this ROM that holds the key. When the disk needs to be erased, apply a current accross the small ROM chip, melting it. That's it! Done! The data are gone forever! All you need is enough current to melt a little piece of silicon. That's not very much current (a regular PC or laptop power supply would do this easily) and it's perfectly safe to do it in an airplane, etc. It can also be done in miliseconds, with no mechanical parts.
Why doesn't someone make disks with this feature? It would be simple, cheap and more effective than any of these dumb mechanical schemes.
The only drawback is that if you do the encryption one block at a time, you don't have block chaining, which means that, for some types of data, some useful info might be recovered by looking at block patterns. But in most cases, what is important is to protect secrets like codes, software, notes, etc, and this technique is 100% effective for that.
How does this subject keep on coming up when there is such a simple solution to it?
You want to be sure to erase everything on the hard drive, hold it up to CowBoyNeal's head and your drive will be wiped clean in no time.
We could easily toss 500 nukes at China and still have enough remaining to blast the rest of the world into space (including ourselves), but I fail to see the purpose. There are no cities or centralized sites in China beyond the count of about 300 worth bothering with. Guess we could pick targets just for fun - "Think you can hit the top of Tiangmen Mountain without knocking the temple off the side? We'll send a satellite to get a photo next Thursday. Betcha a latte' ya can't do it!"
I fail to see how the a China-U.S. nuclear war scenario is "scary". Only a U.S.-Russia nuclear war is truly "scary" - every other nuclear scenario is a 15-minute picture show for the U.S. and the end of the world for it's opponents.
I'm surprised no one has pointed out the potential for protecting "certain content" from prying eyes... I'm disappointed in you slashdot. For shame.
~ I am logged on, therefore I am.
It's obviously the percentage that counts here not the absolute numbers. 10% means for every person below the poverty line there are 9 above it. So I could make a counter-argument by simply inverting the numbers.
If you take the 'actual' numbers then how does Afghanistan stack up here? It has less than half the amount of "poor" people compared to the US - only about 16 million, so how does that make you feel about the Afghan people? (Btw, total Afghan population is 31 million)
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
... magnets can destroy magnetically stored data! Who could have guessed, or even more so already knew? I guess the warning labels on floppies with a magnet beside the floppy was there just for fun, this is the real new shit!
Allow me to sum up this article.
"We got a bigger magnet".
Thanks, guys. That was f**king genius.
I have commonly heard it said that overwritten data can be recovered, so I went Googling for a rebuttal to this argument. Turns out, you appear to be right! Recovering of overwritten data is largely a myth. /me continues to use good ole' shred.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Stream the data to tape. You can quickly and easily melt the entire tape in a small enclosure designed for that purpose. Melting the entire tape cartridge sufficiently might be possible but you could end up with a charred chunk with layers that are still readable. The device should run the length of the tape into the melting chamber (a slice at a time). It could even degauss the tape as an added measure. Of course, the fumes are a negative but something like that would probably be more affordable and probably wouldn't weight 125lbs.
The One-time pad has been mathematically proven to be unbreakable, period (of course, only under certain conditions, like you can only use the pad once and the pad has to be truly random)
see Wikipedia's article on one time pads
It's probably better to use hardware encryption in the drive, with a removable hardware encryption key. That way, you can "erase" the data simply by removing the key.
So "thermiting" is the infinitive verb form of thermite? Fantastic! I will have to incorporate it into my lexicon.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
When I was taking physics, raising something above the Curie point (MUCH colder than thermite) blanked all the magnetization.
This event back in 2001 before 9/11 was shortly forgotten.
I don't know what their standing orders were, but I think they should've ditched the craft. They had to come from somewhere and there were other US forces in theater. The water wasn't cold and they had survival gear anyway.
Why would they have risked handing over military secrets to an "unofficial enemy", the same people they were spying on, and risk becoming prisoners of another state (possibly subjecting themselves to torture), and creating a HUGE international nicident?
I would've rather spent a few hours in the South China sea thank you very much.
Libertas in infinitum
Having worked in the advanced technology division of a major hard disk drive maker for over 8 years, it was interesting to read this discussion. Let me clarify a few points:
1. Encryption may be an alternative way to solve this problem. Properly implemented, encryption is effective and cannot be broken.
2. You need ONE device per plane. The idea is that the crew would pass each disk drive through the bulk eraser.
3. The device cannot be made smaller/ligher (unless you reduce the size of the slot for the drive). You could use smaller form factor disk drives and reduce the bulk somewhat
4. Completely overwritten data CANNOT be recovered from a modern disk drive. You will have to trust me on this. I am ready to pay a REALLY NICE bottle of wine to whomever can accomplish this feat.
5. Even so, overwriting ALL your data is NOT an option just because the time required to do so (especially on a high-capacity disk drive) may exceed 30 minutes
6. Making the disk platters out of some of the exotic materials suggested is not possible. Mechanical hardness requires the platters to be extremely hard. Think about it: The bits are so small and the head is flying just a few nm high, if the platters "give way", you will not be able to read the data. Also, the magnetic multilayers that comprise the actual storage media need an adequate substrate to be grown with the right magnetic and tribological properties. I hate to tell you, but hard disk drives are very sophisticated and highly optimized devices, even though this is not reflected in the purchase price....
7. Throwing the drives out of the window, while in practice may work, does not give you the CERTAINTY that the data will not be recovered. Besides, this will work well from a plane or ship, but not so well from a terrestrial vehicle.
8. There are a few other ways (which I cannot reveal here) to render recovery of the data EXTREMELY hard (impossible for all practical purposes), but the requirements said "unlimited time and resources"...
In summary, it seems to me that Georgia Tech did a reasonably good job. It took them three years to come up with this. Had they asked any of the disk drive makers, we would have given them the solution in two weeks.
"The team claimed the magnetic eraser could also be used for commercial applications like quickly erasing VHS tapes, floppy drives, data cassettes and hard drives."
I did that years ago, I've got a magnet that vhs tapes will stick to, and it does a wonderful jub of erasing them. I havent tried that with a hard drive yet though.
what sig?
why not use dram especially in these sensitive items? when things go bad, power will be cut and data will be erased. but can data be recovered from memory after power has been removed?
anyway, for the hdd, is modifying the content of the file better than erasing it? for example, you can binary edit the file and insert random data into it. at least even when the hdd remaps certain parts to other areas of the hdd, data will appear to be random. or why not create a virtual drive from a full file of an existing harddrive, will this make it harder to recover data? and lastly, why not encrypt the files instead? i'm encrypting my important files to a virtual drive (supplied by ibm/ultimaco.) though i am not sure how difficult it is to get access to it.
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
http://www.bitmicro.com/
If you have a look there you will find some pretty decent spec solid state drives that are US DoD certified. With their secureErase system, they claim to be able to safely and securely erase data in a fraction of the time it takes with other flash based systems. They can also be setup to erase the data if power is lost for any reason (eg. being shot down). There are huge advantages for solid state storage over traditional HDs in the military. Who cares if it costs hundreds or thousands of dollars more, they are the military.
You're right it would likely not be allowed for a flight-critical system. However, for an electronic warfare surveillance system, which is more likely to require high capacity storage media than a flight computer, it is a good method.
wait - our objective is to protect secrets and data of the highest sensitive nature, and we are worried about preserving the operational integrity of a drive in a laptop that costs at most (estimating extremely liberally here) $1000?
just use a fuckin' hammer.
1. hit drive with hammer as hard as you fuckin' can.
2. repeat step 1 as many times as it takes to render object unidentifiable as hard drive.
Drive effectively useless, and data right along with it.
What's wrong with Boot & Nuke? http://dban.sourceforge.net/
I've often tossed around the idea with friends of putting a hard-drive within a microwave, as a sort of quick destroy. Here's the thought process; the harddrive itself is sealed within a nice farady cage. However the wires and other circuits leading into the drive would act as an antenna bringing those nice sparks that you see with a cd in the microwave. This will also probably destroy the disk controller by coupling in high voltage to the digital circuits, but hey it's a quick zap.
They made a super powerful magnet light enough to take on a plane.
http://www.thebroken.org/
For a nice video of thermite destorying a laptop.
Make that /dev/urandom or you could end up waiting a loooooong time for it to finish.
HAND.
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Modern incendiary grenades are adequate to destroy materials up to TS/SCI.
Hard drive platters are generally aluminum, which melts at 660C. Thermate grenades release molten iron at 2500C.
-Peter
PS: Slashdot eats my °s.
-P
The raptors have a window in its housing letting one can show off the platters. Why not make that window removable and when in need to erase the drive just pour in some sand while it's spinning. That will surely sand of anything magnetic. Or make the heads lower themselves on to the platter and lathe the magnetic layer off. When the magnetic top layer is shaved off into dust the platters are nothing more than metallic frisbees.
stuffed with personally-identifiable data are legend.
China did hold our people and our plane, and returned the plane in pieces.
That seems like the actions of an enemy, declared or no.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Destruction is not.
Government agencies are paranoid, and in many cases for good reason. When an enemy has your data for years at a time, there's a good chance they can break it. They can dupe it and try to brute force it in parallel.
There's a lot of peace of mind knowing that you don't have to worry about any of this.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
After spending 15 years of my life designing disk drives, I need to laugh at the banter on this topic.
:)
Destroy the drive by crushing it, quick and easy.
Or -
A sealed cylinder with the appropriate chemicals designed to inject into the internals of the drive to destroy the surface of the plated media would do it as well.
Remember this needs to happen in seconds. You are ditching a plane or making an unscheduled landing on a hostile airstrip. Overwrites and all that take too long.
A lot of the "recovered data from damaged drives" is urban legend. This is especially true of HDD's developed in the last 5 years. Older drives were easier to tear apart.
Encryption is not going to cut it. Cyphers can be broken, that's what a lot of the MPP supercomputers get used for.
You want military secrets? Get a few good looking hookers to ply the right engineers and military folks with booze and sex and you will get the information you are looking for. Sometime the old-fashioned way works the best.
www.effectiveelectrons.com "chips that work" Analog, RF, Mixed Signal
pack an AES chip into every hard disk (this is a trivial silicon chip, fabricated in ASIC and mass produced this is likely to cost way below 5$), and pack a master key into the first few sectors. Make the AES encryption transparent. The drive firmware reads the master key on power up and en/decrypts without user intervention.
However: when a special ATA command is issued the master key is overwritten with a new one (see http://luks.endorphin.org/LUKS-on-disk-format.pdf how this can be done safely). This operation doesn't take a second and instantaneously kills your data. The result: a new blank entropy filled HD.
So what's the economic value of this new invention? Likely zero.
To clarify things, here's several scenarios for erasure:
/dev/random' isn't
/dev/pattern01' through 'dd /dev/pattern35'
"delete file" erasure: tell the OS that that part of a file system doesn't have any current ownership,
and that the filename doesn't exist, i. e. doesn't point to any data.
"overwrite sectors" erasure: direct the hard disk drive to put new, noninformative, data into the
spaces formerly occupied by a file's data (and maybe metadata, like the file's icon and such)
"multiple remagnetize" erasure: direct the hard disk drive to put all (in binary terms, both) physical
magnetizitions onto the data area, so that data's remnant traces are not informative
"whole-disk multiple" erasure: ensure that all areas on the hard disk and all other data-holding parts (flash ROM)
are multiply rewritten. This would make the bad-block list disappear, might even make the
original format (how many tracks and sectors) unknowable to an investigator.
After "delete file", unerase software can bring much data to light
by scanning the drive through the normal hardware. Because EVERYONE KNOWS THIS, there
are 'secure erase' options in many disk tools (Norton "Wipe File", Mac OS X "Secure Empty Trash" etc.)
Those secure erase tools do multiple "write-over-sector", but there are some
regulations that require "multiple remagnetize" erasure, and even 'dd
guaranteed there; you gotta pay money for a tool certified for that use. Here's why:
What everyone DOESN'T know, is that "write-over-sector" leaves behind some small regions
(magnetic domains) in places the read/write heads cannot access, which can be sensed by
exotic techniques (optical rotation, neutron scattering, electron beam microprobing). The
erase-35-times and DOD (military) multiple-erase requirements are aimed at this kind of
exotic stuff. Nothing you can do in software would get data back from "write-over-sector"
erasure.
The modern disk drive compacts the data into a serial bit stream of known bandwidth and
containing parity/error correcting code information, and DOES NOT put ones down on the
disk when ones are in the data (MFM, RLL, and suchlike encoding schemes are in use on ALL
media I'm aware of). This embedded-clock-and-data stream is hard to predict (what does
Hitachi use on sATA drives this week? I don't know. Does anyone?), but WITH KNOWLEDGE
of the encoding scheme, there are different recommended patterns for ensuring
erasure to the standard of 'put ones on every spot, then zeros on every spot' . The use of
software with ones in the DATA INPUT is not going to cause ones in the MAGNETIZED PATTERN,
but you can come up with a set of data inputs that DOES effectively hit every bit of the surface.
The famous paper on erasure has thirty-five scenarios for the encoding on the disk,
and attempts to give a full remagnetize (with 'dd
kinds of operations).
So, that's a third kind of erase, intended to remagnetize all portions of the disk surface.
The formal requirement to remagnetize the surface is ridiculously strict, becaue the exotic techniques
DON'T KNOW HISTORY. Those random little domains can be left over from the manufacturer's
bad-block scan, or from last December's diagnostic reformat, or from the camera run from last
week, or from this week's most sensitive information, or can be a combination of all of those.
Or, it could be a bit of cosmic ray induced damage. The exotic reconstruction technique
doesn't have any noise margin, it doesn't ignore the insignificant; noise is guaranteed.
So he disobeyed typical orders and didn't get a court martial. And they didn't scuttle the plane. And they didn't dump their electronics in the acid bath that they would typically have on board. And we didn't mount a rescue operation or destroy the plane remotely. None of this makes sense because then the Chinese could figure out what kind of technology we have and what kind of information we can collect on them.
Right?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
There's a lot of paranoia about erased data not being "really" erased, but Nixon's 18 minutes is still gone. Using identical equipment, many researcher have tried to erase, then recover voices from audio tape like what would have been on the watergate tapes.
Why didn't Nixon just destroy the whole tape? That way it could have simply been "lost" instead of a great mystery.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
American hard drive degausses you!
I've never been able to get any of my hammers to stay magnetised. Physical shock (rock masonry, pounding nails, or working steel) eventually removes the magnetism.
Before some grad student posts a dissertation based on a bunch of textbooks, saying I don't know what I'm talking about, try doing the fscking experiment, OK?
How you say? Right here http://www.data-recovery-software.net/ It's a wonderful little program.
$180 gets you all you need. Not quite the $19.99, though that would have been nice. Is it perfect? Newp! But it does work, quite well actually.