Timeline for Securely erasing USB flash drives from a bootable media
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
6 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dec 30, 2014 at 23:29 | history | edited | user42178 | CC BY-SA 3.0 | added 980 characters in body |
| Nov 11, 2014 at 5:56 | comment | added | user42178 | @Mark yes indeed, but for this case it's a bit irrelevant to the original question. | |
| Nov 11, 2014 at 5:54 | comment | added | Mark | With solid-state media, you can't count on two writes to the same logical sector winding up on the same physical sector the way you can with spinning disks. The drive's wear-leveling algorithms can (and often will) spread them out; if the drive has spare sectors to replace worn-out ones, a "full-disk" shred will miss data on the spare sectors. See security.stackexchange.com/questions/5662/… for more information. | |
| Nov 11, 2014 at 5:42 | comment | added | user42178 | @Mark for shred I'm not so sure - it's specifically designed to securely erase data. In my example I use only one pass so it's not that secure but with its default settings it's already better (three passes of random data if I remember right). But note that we're talking about flash drives and conventional secure data destruction methods may not be effective on them. | |
| Nov 11, 2014 at 5:40 | comment | added | Mark | Note also that neither option will work for securely deleting data: both dd and shred will make the data unavailable through ordinary means (including anything a virus would be able to do), but a forensic data recovery effort may be able to read it. | |
| Nov 11, 2014 at 5:35 | history | answered | user42178 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |