Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Data Remanence Solutions?
MightyMartian writes "The company I work for has just had their government contract renewed, which is good news, giving me several more years of near-guaranteed employment! However, in going through all the schedules and supplementary documents related to the old contract, which we will begin winding down next spring, we've discovered some pretty stiff data remanence requirements that, for hard drives at least, boil down to 'they must be sent to an appropriately recognized facility for destruction.' Now keep in mind that we are the same organization that has been delivering this contract all along, so the equipment isn't going anywhere. What's more, destruction of hard drives means we have to buy new ones, which is going to cost us a lot of money, particular with prices being so high. I've looked at using encryption as a means of destroying data, in that if you encrypt a drive or a set of files with an appropriately long and complex key, and then destroy all copies of that key, that data effectively is destroyed. I'd like to write up a report to submit to our government contract managers, and would be interested if any Slashdotters have experience with this, or have any references or citations to academic or industry papers on dealing with data remanence without destroying physical media?"
DBAN, Darik's Boot and Nuke, will wipe a hard drive to any of several government standards. If they are fine with mere software disposal of data, then DBAN is the way to go. http://www.dban.org/.
If they insist on physical destruction, I'm sure there are companies in your area that will handle that for you.
Yea, you're remembering that contest how you want to remember it. The prize was a pittance, and the "company" offering it was a handful of people. There were also ridiculous restrictions, such as not damaging the single physical drive the whole challenge was based around. And several data companies said they likely could recover some data, just not necessarily the specific file that that the challenge was based around (as a general rule, you can't target a file, you get whatever it is you get). But the process involves ripping the drives to pieces and costs significantly more than the challenge was worth. And since the challenge was issued by a handful of guys rather than an actual, large company, very little publicity would have been generated, so it wasn't worth it to anyone.
Now, even if that story happened exactly as you remember it, it's still irrelevant. The point isn't that that it's currently possible, it's that it's theoretically possible and thus may be trivial in the near or distant future. For certain kinds of data, that is a world of difference.