On 2/1/06, Grant <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Thanks Peter. That is quite contrary to what most of the other posts
> in this thread are saying. Those are all just rumors and myths?
I think for what would be available for you, me, or ${megacorp} to
use, yes, it is rumor and myth. As I mentioned previously, the
density of data on modern drives makes surface analysis (by which I
mean anything that does not simply read the drive with standard drive
electronics and and search the resulting data) very difficult. I
would say impossible, but we simply don't know what techniques are
available to the NSA or other government agencies to use.
Again, my *guess* is that with a *very* modern drive where the
manufacturers simply cannot squeeze any more data onto the platter,
that even the NSA would not be able to recover any data. But it may
be that is just what they /want/ us to think...
I posted this before, but it is the best and most thorough study I
could find on this topic:
http://www.simson.net/clips/academic/2003.IEEE.DiskDriveForensics.pdf
And another paper referenced in the above study:
http://www.cryptoapps.com/~peter/usenix01.pdf
This paper talks about physical scanning of memory devices for
encryption keys, so is a bit off-topic (even for this off-topic
thread), but it should give you a hint of what kind of effort would be
required to try and recover overwritten data from a hard disk.
Just a quick quote from the Peter Gutmann paper:
----
Finally, however, the best defence against data remanence problems in
semiconductor memory is, as with the related problem of data stored on
magnetic media, the fact that ever-shrinking device dimensions (DRAM
density is increasing by 50% per year [74]), and the use of novel
techniques such as multilevel storage (which is being used in flash
memory and may eventually make an appearance in DRAM as well [75]) is
making it more and more difficult
to recover data from devices. As the 1996 paper suggested for magnetic
media, the easiest way to make the task of recovering data difficult
is to use the newest, highest-density (and by extension most exotic)
storage devices available.
----
-Richard
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