Hard drive encryption (and to a lesser extent, secure hard drive erasing) has been in the news regarding child pornography crossing the US border, government officials around the world erasing incriminating emails and other nefarious headlines.
The one that caught my eye was of a person crossing the border from Canada into the United States.
His laptop was searched in customs. Border Agents found all kinds of pornography on the computer (including child pornography) and arrested the owner of the laptop. Later on, when the computer-savvy investigators went to collect evidence on the computer, they were presented with an interesting prompt when they attempted to access the Z: drive.
Enter your PGP passphrase:
PGP is short for “pretty good privacy.” PGP is so good, in fact even the government can’t break into the files on the computer. The investigators couldn’t collect any evidence.
When a grand jury instructed the man to provide the passphrase, the judge cited the 5th Amendment and agreed with the defense that he cannot be compelled to divulge the passphrase. According to the 5th Amendment, he cannot be obligated to testify to his own detriment. In court, the man said he “wasn’t sure” if child porn was on the computer. He admitted to downloading lots of pornography, and if he found kiddie porn, he deleted it.
Sensational stories like these tend to cast a negative light on tools like encryption and permanently erasing files. If you’ve got nothing to hide, you wouldn’t use these tools… right?
Wrong!
The more paranoid folks among us would immediately be able to name a dozen or more reasons. I’ll just name a few real-life senarios that happen every day to people all over the world, often times due to unfortunate events such as a company or government laptop going missing, hell… even a 1.44MB floppy disc contained a hundred thousand records of some government employees in the UK.
Here are the bigger ones…
1. Identity theft.
2. That “home video” you promised to destroy.
3. Selling a hard drive or other rewritable storage device.
That said, GNU shred which is part of coreutils is a great tool to delete those sorts of files we all probably use at one time or another.
Here’s a snippet of the manual:
NAME
shred – overwrite a file to hide its contents, and optionally delete itSYNOPSIS
shred [OPTIONS] FILE […]DESCRIPTION
Overwrite the specified FILE(s) repeatedly, in order to make it harder
for even very expensive hardware probing to recover the data.Mandatory arguments to long options are mandatory for short options
too.-f, –force
change permissions to allow writing if necessary-n, –iterations=N
Overwrite N times instead of the default (25)-s, –size=N
shred this many bytes (suffixes like K, M, G accepted)-u, –remove
truncate and remove file after overwriting-v, –verbose
show progress-x, –exact
do not round file sizes up to the next full block;this is the default for non-regular files
-z, –zero
add a final overwrite with zeros to hide shredding
And the comments from shred.c, written by Colin Plumb:
* Do a more secure overwrite of given files or devices, to make it harder
* for even very expensive hardware probing to recover the data.
*
* Although this process is also known as "wiping", I prefer the longer
* name both because I think it is more evocative of what is happening and
* because a longer name conveys a more appropriate sense of deliberateness.
*
* For the theory behind this, see "Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic
* and Solid-State Memory", on line at
* http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html
*
* Just for the record, reversing one or two passes of disk overwrite
* is not terribly difficult with hardware help. Hook up a good-quality
* digitizing oscilloscope to the output of the head preamplifier and copy
* the high-res digitized data to a computer for some off-line analysis.
* Read the "current" data and average all the pulses together to get an
* "average" pulse on the disk. Subtract this average pulse from all of
* the actual pulses and you can clearly see the "echo" of the previous
* data on the disk.
*
* Real hard drives have to balance the cost of the media, the head,
* and the read circuitry. They use better-quality media than absolutely
* necessary to limit the cost of the read circuitry. By throwing that
* assumption out, and the assumption that you want the data processed
* as fast as the hard drive can spin, you can do better.
Oh, the things you can find in source code header comments…. that’s fantastic commentary from someone who knows about the topic.
I ran a 6-pass random wipe (followed by a round of zeros) on a 160GB hard drive as well as a 2GB flash drive that were laying around the house. I’m sure there was all sorts of personal information on those. The 160GB drive took about 7 hours to finish and the 2GB thumb drive took about 26 minutes to complete.
I’ll be writing an article on using PGP to encrypt a hard drive in Linux in the near future, but in the mean time, enjoy the video of my 2GB flash drive loosing another 7 write cycles off it’s rewrite capacity. 🙂