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."

Comments

Re:New technique?

[Anonymous Coward]

Aluminum can act oddly in the presens of magnetic feels. see this link for information on how it might be able to bens platters.

Wrong

[bwd]

The paper you are quoting from is horribly out of date and very little of that applies to modern drives. This post does a good job of explaining Gutmann's more recent comments.

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.

Re:Joe does it

[gweihir]

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,

Let me correct that: There is no way in this universe software can recover anything from a disk overwritten once with zeros. It is fundamentally impossible.

Also to Peter Gutman's paper: It is still relevant, but the technology has changed. Gutman is very relevant for things like floppy disks (that can hold 100MB, but are used only for 2MB). But todays HDDs go so close to the limits of the amount of data that can be physically present on a disk (as dictated by S/N ratio and surface area), that even a single overwrite with random data may be completely unrecoverable with any technology. Nobody really knows.

Re:First question:

[Jackmn]

Encryption can be broken. Always.

One time pads cannot be broken.

Strong encryption algorithms with suitably long key lengths will take longer than the lifetime of the sun to crack (barring the possibility of quantum computing taking off).

Interesting stuff

[TheSpoom]

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.