From: "Mark Rosen" <mrosen@peganet.com>
Date: Tue, 10 Dec 1996 14:34:24 -0800 (PST)
To: <jfricker@vertexgroup.com>
Subject: Re: Secure Erase for PCs?
Message-ID: <199612102235.RAA29568@mercury.peganet.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


> >	Though, technically, no disk can be securely erased, my program,
	Read Peter Gutmann's paper on securely deleting files at:
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/secure_del.html.

> > Very Good Privacy, can securely delete files after they have been
encrypted.
> 
> Thought you said "no disk...". So how does VGP do it?
	I should have added quotes around "securely delete." The end of Peter
Gutmann's paper states "it is effectively impossible to sanitise storage
locations by simple overwriting them, no matter how many overwrite passes
are made or what data patterns are written. However by using the relatively
simple methods presented in this paper the task of an attacker can be made
significantly more difficult, if not prohibitively expensive." VGP tries to
make is prohibitively expensive (that is, in essence, what all ciphers do;
someone can break just about any cipher if they have enough money).

VGP can be downloaded at: http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Pines/2690
If you have any questions, please e-mail vgp@cryogen.com