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Re: [Full-disclosure] Disk wiping -- An alternate approach?

From: Michael Holstein <michael.holstein_at_nospam>
Date: Tue Jan 26 2010 - 18:31:02 GMT
To: Stefan Weimar <sw@tanis.toppoint.de>

> Yes, but what if I overwrite the device with random data from the very
> first to the very last byte? Suppose the size of the device hasn't
> decreased I'd think that wear-levelling has no chance to spare blocks in
> this case.
>
>

Research paper on forensics for flash media :

http://www.ssddfj.org/papers/SSDDFJ_V1_1_Breeuwsma_et_al.pdf

In any case, provided you take a factory-new drive and immediately install an encrypted filesystem on it, any such "orphan" data would be essentially random.

Regards,

Michael Holstein
Cleveland State University

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