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EFF: Ubuntu 12.04 will bring OS-level privacy optionsEFF: Ubuntu 12.04 will bring OS-level privacy optionsPosted Mar 10, 2012 12:48 UTC (Sat) by epa (subscriber, #39769)In reply to: EFF: Ubuntu 12.04 will bring OS-level privacy options by slashdot Parent article: EFF: Ubuntu 12.04 will bring OS-level privacy options
Hard disk encryption isn't granular enough: it doesn't help you when you want to destroy the last hour's logs (so that even you cannot access them), but keep the rest (whether encrypted or not).
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EFF: Ubuntu 12.04 will bring OS-level privacy options Posted Mar 12, 2012 12:42 UTC (Mon) by slashdot (guest, #22014) [Link]
It's really hard to do it though.
For starters, you'll need to change the kernel to scrub sectors of deleted files with multiple rewrites, do the same for swap on shutdown, and prevent any disk indexer from indexing the affected data.
And then change all applications to make sure data (including, say, the last selection in a file dialog, browser autocomplete, shell history, etc.) is properly stored in separate files to allow it to be found on deletion.
If you want to only delete some of the data, then it gets much harder, because logs need proper timestamps, incremental data structures (like autocomplete or LRU) needs to be equipped with a journal allowing to remove parts of it, and so on.
At any rate, things like Bash history can end up having all sorts information like passwords, so you'd probably need to delete them for any kind of deletion operation.
Or just give up, and encypt everything, making this a non-issue.
EFF: Ubuntu 12.04 will bring OS-level privacy options Posted Mar 12, 2012 14:47 UTC (Mon) by union (subscriber, #36393) [Link]
The way I understand this is, that it prevents unwanted log data to be written in the first place.
Essentially it's a output filter for logs.
EFF: Ubuntu 12.04 will bring OS-level privacy options Posted Mar 15, 2012 10:50 UTC (Thu) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]
As I mentioned, encrypting everything doesn't achieve the same aim, since you can always decrypt it later - unless you destroy the key, in which case you lose all data not just the part you wanted to destroy. You may want to forget the last hour of history completely, so that not even you can retrieve it later. (The best answer, as another pointed out, is not to log it in the first place.)
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