If Gentoo can die off, ReiserFS is doomed (was Re: Reiser FS or ext3?)

[Monty J. Harder]

On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 9:32 PM, Leo Mauler <webgiant at yahoo.com> wrote:

>  The government standard is a medium security level application that
> specifies overwriting a hard drive six times through three iterations. Each
> iteration consists of two write-passes on a hard drive. The first iteration
> removes the files over at the drive surface, while the second iteration
> registers "zeros" on the surface.


What the hell does that even mean?

"removes the files over at the drive surface"

It sounds like they say to write six times to the drive, with the
even-numbered writes being 0s.  I suggested twice that.  So what do they
recommend writing on the odd-numbered passes if not (pseudo)random junk?



Back when there was some correspondence between the data sent to the drive
and the actual patterns written to disk, one could try to design a sequence
of patterns to do a really good job of eliminating the "shadows" of previous
writes.  Since every drive potentially uses a different algorithm for the
low-level storage, the logical thing to do would be to let the drive itself
handle wiping.

Extend the command set to provide a directive to securely wipe a range of
sectors on a drive.  The drive would then implement its own method that
takes into account the algorithm it uses.  Since the drive has access to
samples that are not passed through to the CPU, it would be able to tailor
what it writes to what is on that sector, and after a few passes of
read/write feedback, get things pretty thoroughly scrambled.  In this
instance, the drive would be writing patterns that it never writes to encode
data, because it would be deliberately putting flux transitions between the
normal locations where they would be located.

Also, when a drive detects that a sector is no longer reliable (even with
the error-correction codes it can't read back what it just wrote to that
sector), and is taken out of service (substituting a spare sector
transparent to the CPU's knowledge) the retired sector should automatically
receive this treatment, lest it contain sensitive info that could later be
recovered by someone who bypasses the normal redirection.

Drives with this technology could be marketed as having "Secure Deletion"
capabilities, and easily command premium prices.  Wouldn't you gladly pay
$10 more for a drive that can wipe sectors so well that even the spooks
would get nothing out of them?
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