Secure Delete utilities for Linux EXT3

[Roger Oberholtzer]

I have in a box, Norton Utilities for System V Unix. Aside from all the
usual Norton stuff of a while back (the Commander, for example), it also had
Norton's UnErase capability for Unix. It was a device driver that 'caught'
deletes and made them into temp files instead. Of course, this was in the
days when Interactive owned Norton, and so Unix was allowed...

In fact, a device driver is not needed. One should only need a libc preload
module that wraps the functions that remove files and takes modified action.
Like moving it to a holding directory on the disk. This way it could be
file-system agnostic.

One good reason for not really needing a device driver is that if a device
driver always saved all deleted files, a simple program compile could result
in many unwanted saved files. The libc preload allows it to be very easily
user and even command specific. Maybe only the 'rm' command for users.

Program trace utilities like valgrind do this sort of thing to system calls.
I have not seen anything targeted at saving files.

On Thu, 15 Apr 2004
10:00:06+1000"James McDonald" <james at jamesmcdonald.id.au> wrote:

> 
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Shawn Tayler" <stayler at xmtservices.net>
> To: <linux-users at linux-sxs.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, April 13, 2004 12:25 PM
> Subject: Re: Secure Delete utilities for Linux EXT3
> 
> 
> > On Tue, 13 Apr 2004 07:22:58 +1000 James McDonald
> > <james at jamesmcdonald.id.au> exclaimed:
> >
> > > >dd if=/dev/zero of=/partition/you/want/wipe/clean
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > > Yes I know about this command but it's a little indescriminate as a
> > > free space cleaner.
> > >
> > > I'm looking for something similar to sysinternal.com's sdelete utility
> > > that uses Windows Defrag API to idenitify free space and overwrite it
> > > with zero's or random stuff.
> >
> > Couldn't you use /dev/random as the source?  There mustr be a simple
> > elegant solution to this....
> >
> I think this is one of those things that needs a special utility/kernel
> patch created by someone who knows the way the system identifies on-disk
> free space which then overwrites free space with zero/random content or by
> using a delete utility/system call that always swipes files and not just
> unlinks them.
> 
> Sadly however I am not a programmer and can't spend the time to learn C
> then learn the code to create an application that would do it. So if
> anyone sees a free space swipe utility in their travails let me know.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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