Re: How long will this take?
On Wed, Jun 10, 2020 at 1:14 PM Nicolas George <george@nsup.org> wrote:
>
> 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.
Except wiping a disk is trivial. Just start the job and come back
later to a clean disk. It's not like you have to wipe it by hand. I do
it routinely before I put a disk to use that's going to be used for a
couple of years.
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