Secure deletion with journaling?
Posted Dec 7, 2006 15:04 UTC (Thu) by
abatters (
✭ supporter ✭, #6932)
Parent article:
Secure deletion and trash bin support
According to the man page for 'shred', overwriting a file stored on a journaled filesystem (via normal write() system calls) does not necessarily overwrite the actual data on disk. I do not see how moving a deleted file to a special directory makes it possible to perform a subsequent secure delete if the VFS doesn't special-case it in other ways. This is especially true if the data had been written to blocks in the filesystem that are no longer associated with the file.
OTOH, the man page for chattr does mention a 'data journaling' attribute; maybe you are supposed to turn off data journaling at the same time as setting secure delete (preferably before writing any actual sensitive data to the file). Does anyone know if this flag is honored?
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