Security and harddisk crubbing in Linux

[Drake Diedrich]

On Fri, Oct 26, 2001 at 12:46:19AM +1000, Travis Ecclestone wrote:
> 
> I have some scrubbing tools for Windows file systems (East Tec Eraser
> 2000) but want to know about similar programs for Linux.  Do they exist? 
> what is the best one?  I want one that will prevent software and hardware
> tool recovery.  East Tec Eraser can sanitise to a level over and above the
> US Dept of Defense standards and to the Guttman level (prevention of
> hardware tool recovery).  Is there a similar system around for Linux/
> 

   What is a disk scrubber required to do beyond:

for count in 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ; do dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hdc ; done

   /dev/urandom would take about a day to generate the necessary ~60G of
pseudorandom data per pass, but you could always write very short programs
(about three lines of C) to generate acceptable patterns instead and cut
that to the hard drive writing speed (about an hour/pass).

   [ Obligatory dig: why does DoD bother to create security standards for
     Windows machines? Hasn't the horse already bolted? ]