Sterilizing free space

[Christopher Browne]

On 1/3/06, Peter <plp-ysDPMY98cNQDDBjDh4tngg at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Tue, 3 Jan 2006, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
>
> > On Tue, Jan 03, 2006 at 01:12:27PM -0500, Neil Watson wrote:
> >> Using /dev/random may not be practical.  The system will need you to
> >> generate entropy.  You'll need to give the system some mouse traffic
> >> throughout the procedure.  This could take a very long time.  I'd stick
> >> with /dev/zero.  No, there is no /dev/one.
> >
> > Depends if you use random or urandom.  One uses entrophy for quality
> > random values, while the other is just pseudo random and not of high
> > quality.  Probably still plenty random for wiping though.  I can never
> > renember which /dev/random is which though.
>
> However reading the Guttman paper before wasting too much time on this
> could be beneficial imho.

Yeah.

If there is a "formal" need for 'wiping,' then the answer probably
involves making sure that you have expertise and equipment inside your
organization that can be used to outright DESTROY the hardware, down
to the point of grinding the disks into powder.

If you haven't reason to be that paranoid, then it is probably
over-paranoid to even go as far as using /dev/urandom to "wipe" the
disk.

I don't see there being a stable mid-point...
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