Re: ext2/ext3, sync/async filesystems, data hygiene
On Thursday 28 July 2005 07:41, Anonymous wrote:
> Tom Vier <tmv@comcast.net> wrote:
> > I'm the author of wipe, btw (the one at wipe.sf.net). Meta-data
> > journaling alone isn't a problem (except for wiping filenames), but full
> > data journaling is, and some journaled fs (like reiser) don't necessarily
> > place data on the same blocks when you overwrite (log-structured and
> > versioning filesystems, especially). To be sure you overwrite the old
> > blocks, you have to overwrite the whole partition.
>
> But that's not usually practical!
>
> > That's why it's best to encrypt sensitive data in the first place. That
> > way, there's no plain text left around.
>
> True, but if you want to edit a file (with vi, gimp, openoffice or
> anything else) you have to save it then encrypt it then wipe it. A
> file you can't edit is not a useful file!
I think what may have been implied was hard disk encryption in which an entire
partition is transparently encrypted. (This can be done with dmcrypt or
loop-AES.) (An easy-to-setup option would be to encrypt /tmp, and send all
non-encrypted plaintext to there before re-encrypting and saving elsewhere;
this is easily done with the cryptsetup
package--read /usr/share/doc/cryptsetup/???. Swap could become dangerous, but
that, too, is easily fixed with the same package.)
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