Anders Andersson (12020-06-10): > Too bad if you end up in a routine police investigation and they find > child pornography when scanning the disks for deleted files. > > "Must have been the previous owner" is a valid defense, but I'd rather > not end up having to use it. Ah, but maybe the previous owner had discovered a cheap cure for covid-19 and big pharma had them silenced. You would be wiping the last traces of their research! Seriously, first we were talking about hard drives straight from the factory in China, making the thread… industrial espionage, I suppose? And now we are talking about child pornography found in an unrelated seizure. So, for that to be relevant, you would need that all the following conditions to be met: - the previous owner had child pornography on this disk; - unencrypted; - they gave it away their disk in a way that makes it reusable; - without wiping it themselves; - cops show up at your door and take the drive to examine it; - they do it before regular use has wiped it. That is a fine Drake equation you got here, but maybe not a rational justification for spending days wiping a drive. For any security measure, it is easy to find afterwards a far-fetched scenario where it makes a difference. But that is how TV writers work, not security. For security, we must first define the attack model, and then search for defense. Otherwise we end up barricading the back door while the key to the front door is still under the mat. Regards, -- Nicolas George
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