Overwriting Hard Drive Data: The Great Wiping Controversy
- Craig Wright,
- Dave Kleiman,
- Shyaam Sundhar R.S.
- … show all 3 hide
Abstract
Often we hear controversial opinions in digital forensics on the required or desired number of passes to utilize for properly overwriting, sometimes referred to as wiping or erasing, a modern hard drive. The controversy has caused much misconception, with persons commonly quoting that data can be recovered if it has only been overwritten once or twice. Moreover, referencing that it actually takes up to ten, and even as many as 35 (referred to as the Gutmann scheme because of the 1996 Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory published paper by Peter Gutmann) passes to securely overwrite the previous data. One of the chief controversies is that if a head positioning system is not exact enough, new data written to a drive may not be written back to the precise location of the original data. We demonstrate that the controversy surrounding this topic is unfounded.
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- Title
- Overwriting Hard Drive Data: The Great Wiping Controversy
- Book Title
- Information Systems Security
- Book Subtitle
- 4th International Conference, ICISS 2008, Hyderabad, India, December 16-20, 2008. Proceedings
- Pages
- pp 243-257
- Copyright
- 2008
- DOI
- 10.1007/978-3-540-89862-7_21
- Print ISBN
- 978-3-540-89861-0
- Online ISBN
- 978-3-540-89862-7
- Series Title
- Lecture Notes in Computer Science
- Series Volume
- 5352
- Series ISSN
- 0302-9743
- Publisher
- Springer Berlin Heidelberg
- Copyright Holder
- Springer Berlin Heidelberg
- Additional Links
- Topics
- Keywords
-
- Digital Forensics
- Data Wipe
- Secure Wipe
- Format
- Industry Sectors
- eBook Packages
- Editors
-
-
R. Sekar
(1)
-
Arun K. Pujari
(2)
-
R. Sekar
- Editor Affiliations
-
- 1. Department of Computer Science, Stony Brook University
- 2. Department of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Hyderabad
- Authors
-
-
Craig Wright
(3)
-
Dave Kleiman
(4)
-
Shyaam Sundhar R.S.
(5)
-
Craig Wright
- Author Affiliations
-
- 3. BDO Kendalls, Sydney, Australia
- 4. ComputerForensicExaminer.com, Florida, US
- 5. Symantec, USA
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