Hard drive sanitising, Wipe out, make sure your data is permanently gone

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Drives sanitised using a single pass DoD process.

Using ordinary “DELETE”, “ERASE” & "FORMAT" commands, data on a hard drive remains accessible to a

variety of intrusive procedures.

The WipeOut erasure technique provides a solution to this problem using a series of null-coded overwrites that completely remove all data from the hard drive.

Current Research

Fortunately, several security researchers presented a paper [WRIG08] at the Fourth International Conference on Information Systems Security (ICISS 2008) that declares the “great wiping controversy” about how many passes of overwriting with various data values to be settled: their research demonstrates that a single overwrite using an arbitrary data value will render the original data irretrievable even if MFM and STM techniques are employed.

The researchers found that the probability of recovering a single bit from a previously used HDD was only slightly better than a coin toss, and that the probability of recovering more bits decreases exponentially so that it quickly becomes close to zero.

Therefore, a single pass overwrite with any arbitrary value (randomly chosen or not) is sufficient to render the original HDD data effectively irretrievable.

The best way to ensure data removal—for the highest security environments—is to combine software-based data erasure with physical destruction. That way, there’s absolutely no chance the data can we recovered from any fragments because it has been removed completely.