Overwriting Hard Drive Data: The Great Wiping Controversy (2008) [pdf]
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Re: Overwriting Hard Drive Data: The Great Wiping Controversy (2008) [pdf]
#2Are you willing to take that chance when discarding EOL disks?
Re: Overwriting Hard Drive Data: The Great Wiping Controversy (2008) [pdf]
#3Anything wrong with GNU shred on the block device?
Re: Overwriting Hard Drive Data: The Great Wiping Controversy (2008) [pdf]
#41) Just a funny fact, the Craig Wright who's first author on this paper is that Craig Wright.
2) This is a good paper on the situation, but as I've mentioned before tends to miss the point. The data remanence concern today is usually non-volatile caches and remapped sections of the media which are not documented or accessible to the host. This problem is best known for SSDs but very much exists on modern platter drives as well. No number of host-based overwrites will reliably overwrite these even once, and the manufacturers do not document or disclose the behavior.
Re: Overwriting Hard Drive Data: The Great Wiping Controversy (2008) [pdf]
#5Anything wrong with GNU shred on the block device?
In short, no. Often a plain old zero pass is good enough, but shred defaults to doing three random passes and that'll be sure to destroy any hopes of recovery.
Re: Overwriting Hard Drive Data: The Great Wiping Controversy (2008) [pdf]
#61) Just a funny fact, the Craig Wright who's first author on this paper is that Craig Wright. 2) This is a good paper on the situation, but as I've mentioned before tends to miss the point. The data remanence concern today is usually non-volatile caches and remapped sections of the media which are not documented or accessible to the host. This problem is best known for SSDs but very much exists on modern platter driv…
Do you mean a type of spinning disk that also has flash memory for caching? I thought spinning disks normally used volatile memory for the cache?
Re: Overwriting Hard Drive Data: The Great Wiping Controversy (2008) [pdf]
#71) Just a funny fact, the Craig Wright who's first author on this paper is that Craig Wright. 2) This is a good paper on the situation, but as I've mentioned before tends to miss the point. The data remanence concern today is usually non-volatile caches and remapped sections of the media which are not documented or accessible to the host. This problem is best known for SSDs but very much exists on modern platter driv…
Do you mean a type of spinning disk that also has flash memory for caching? I thought spinning disks normally used volatile memory for the cache?
No, platter drives usually don't have nonvolatile cache although it's hard to say for sure. Enterprise drives are more likely to. The bigger issue with spinning drives is that they move data around the platters in ways not disclosed by the manufacturers, including both optimizations (writing near heads) and error corrections like ending use of problematic parts of the platter. These all leave bits of data in "non-addressable" parts of the platter.
Re: Overwriting Hard Drive Data: The Great Wiping Controversy (2008) [pdf]
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you mean a type of spinning disk that also has flash memory for caching? I thought spinning disks normally used volatile memory for the cache?
No, platter drives usually don't have nonvolatile cache although it's hard to say for sure. Enterprise drives are more likely to. The bigger issue with spinning drives is that they move data around the platters in ways not disclosed by the manufacturers, including both optimizations (writing near heads) and error corrections like ending use of problematic parts of the platter. These all leave bits of data in "non-add…
Ah, that's interesting. I wonder how hard it'd be to find these areas of the disk, I wonder if the location of them is stored in some kind of non volatile memory, so the disk can easily find them.
Re: Overwriting Hard Drive Data: The Great Wiping Controversy (2008) [pdf]
#9You probably don't want to believe anything in this: The author is a well known scammer/con-artist (Craig Wright) who has a long running advanced fee fraud scheme predicated on convincing suckers that he created bitcoin and has some secret stash of billions that he could get to only if his victims help him with some cash flow problems.
He has a long history of using forgeries, faked documents, plagiarism, and impersonation in order to pass himself off as some kind of credible.
This article is debunked in the "Further Epilogue" of https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html
Moreover, the images of their supposed MFM imaging was just copied off a manufacturer's page ( https://web.archive.org/web/20090418043851/https://www.engr.... shows another copy on a similarly old page, citing the source) -- so it seems unlikely that they ever performed any measurements at all. A big chunk was plagiarized from an uncited source ("A Practical Guide to Scanning Probe Microscopy (1993)")... another hallmark of Wright's lame forgeries.
There was a phenomenal twitter thread that went over all this and more, but Wright used spurious legal threats to drive the author off twitter. The biggest loss was where it pointed out that one of the citations in this paper is where they tried to cite Nikola Tesla in [20], but used the title of the 1989 album The Great Radio Controversy by the rock band Tesla ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Radio_Controversy ). :P
These days Wright is busy prolonging a lawsuit against a dozen former and current Bitcoin developers-- including myself--, demanding that they help him compensate for his lack of private keys by publishing a backdoored version of Bitcoin in order to aid him in taking billions of dollars worth of other people's coins, or failing that pay him billions of dollars themselves.
I wouldn't be shocked now if Wright wasn't promoting this article because in one of his lawsuits he claimed hackers hid a "wifi pineapple" in his home and used it to penetrate his systems and then delete his private keys. ... and then before contacting law enforcement he completely wiped his systems, helpfully destroying evidence that the supposed hack never happened and that the keys never existed. So now he's invested in the claim that deletions are never recoverable, to cover for his transparent spoliation.
He's now funded by loans taken out against his non-existing bitcoin fortune, which likely explains why he's cowardly doing everything he can to delay progress in at least five different court cases. Presumably the consequences for him will be dire when his victims start realizing the funds he promised them next existed. Esp because one of the largest sponsors is a former drug smuggler who spent a decade on the run on the DHS most wanted list.
Re: Overwriting Hard Drive Data: The Great Wiping Controversy (2008) [pdf]
#101) Just a funny fact, the Craig Wright who's first author on this paper is that Craig Wright. 2) This is a good paper on the situation, but as I've mentioned before tends to miss the point. The data remanence concern today is usually non-volatile caches and remapped sections of the media which are not documented or accessible to the host. This problem is best known for SSDs but very much exists on modern platter driv…
And the Dave Kleiman who is second author on this paper is that Dave Kleiman, the one who most likely invented bitcoin.
Wright has claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto but has proven himself to be a liar on this topic; by his actions he clearly believes that Kleiman controlled the Satoshi bitcoin fortune before his untimely death.