Live data from Hacker News

Old tech is haunted

therectangle.substack.com

101–103 of 103 posts

Re: Old tech is haunted

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>That's still a non-zero probability Just as there is a nonzero chance of someone recovering your data by reading /dev/urandom. Technically your data could be outputed but the person reading /dev/urandom would not be able to tell if it was just random data or if it was what was wiped. Even if your tolerance for data exfiltration is 0 you can be okay with a non 0 chance for someone to randomly generate the data. >If w…

> Just as there is a nonzero chance of someone recovering your data by reading /dev/urandom. That variety of non-zero is much closer to zero than the risk of increasingly-sophisticated equipment being able to recover overwritten data - and unlike the non-zero risk of such an "infinite typewriters" sort of attack, mitigating the non-zero risk of recovering overwritten information from media is straightforward: destroy…

>zero than the risk of increasingly-sophisticated equipment being able to recover overwritten data

No, it isn't. Reread the paper I referenced. The chance of recover exponentially decays which means the probability does quickly go to zero as the number of bits you want to recover increases.

>trusting an opaque blob of SSD firmware to overwrite all of the data for you.

No, you are trusting them to overwrite the encryption key and that the encryption being used is secure.

Re: Old tech is haunted

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just as there is a nonzero chance of someone recovering your data by reading /dev/urandom. That variety of non-zero is much closer to zero than the risk of increasingly-sophisticated equipment being able to recover overwritten data - and unlike the non-zero risk of such an "infinite typewriters" sort of attack, mitigating the non-zero risk of recovering overwritten information from media is straightforward: destroy…

>zero than the risk of increasingly-sophisticated equipment being able to recover overwritten data No, it isn't. Reread the paper I referenced. The chance of recover exponentially decays which means the probability does quickly go to zero as the number of bits you want to recover increases. >trusting an opaque blob of SSD firmware to overwrite all of the data for you. No, you are trusting them to overwrite the encryp…

> Reread the paper I referenced.

I did.

> The chance of recover exponentially decays

As does the chance of a random number generator accidentally recreating your secret.

And that's assuming, again, that technology doesn't improve.

> No, you are trusting them to overwrite the encryption key and that the encryption being used is secure.

1. That's hardly any more reassuring (though at least it does hopefully mitigate overwriting concerns, assuming that key can't be recovered and the encryption method is indeed more secure)

2. That doesn't explain why secure erase commands take so long relative to other ATA commands (anywhere from seconds to hours), or why that time scales with drive size.

Re: Old tech is haunted

#103
post #63

My sister is very into crystals, actually works at a shop financed by some billionaire's daughter. Every now and then she likes to remind me of that most of our screens are made out of quartz, and highlights the associated qualities of the crystal. I can't recall them but I always find it interesting, something about assigning beliefs and extra qualities onto your everyday objects. Some people believe in a white god…

Not just screens, computer chips are silicon crystals. (Some specialized ICs use other materials, but I don't think any high-density digital logic does.) The entire Internet runs on crystals.

will def mention this the next time we chat, thanks for sharing
Post reply on HN