Re: Defect in XCU rm

[Nick Stoughton <yyyy@xxxxxxxxxx>]

This particular variation of the discussion should really move to
yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

The original discussion on rm -rf / can stay here!

On Mon, 2003-03-17 at 15:12, Jim Meyering wrote:
> yyyyyyy@xxxxxxxx wrote:
> ...
> >>    dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/c0t0d0s2
> >>
> >> where c0t0d0s2 represents the whole disk (as on Solaris),
> >> and is the disk on which everything is stored.
> >
> > I am not a malicious user, and I use the above so often I have a shell
> > script for it (it alternates between /dev/zero and /dev/random for input).
> > It is a fairly good way of initializing disk images, removing confidential
> > data from disks and so forth. Obviously, it works better when the device
> > is not mounted.
> 
> If it is important enough that the confidential data be hard to recover,
> you might want to consider using a tool like GNU shred
> 
>   http://www.gnu.org/manual/coreutils-4.5.4/html_node/coreutils_69.html
> 
> rather than a single overwrite pass with zero or random data.
> 
> Here's a paper with some good background:
> 
>   http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html