Wanting to build a disk wiper ?
- Thread starter knowlesy
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Final year? Seems a little simple to me to be honest - best talk to your project supervisor and see what he thinks before committing yourself.
There are 35 pass standards that the military use. It may be worth looking at those. It's a basic sector wipe with specific bit patterns for each pass to maximise the impact on any magnetic imprint on the drive.
Any way you can then show the effectiveness of 1,4,8,32 passes on the magnetic footprint on the drive (given you're doing forensics) may be a better project.
There are 35 pass standards that the military use. It may be worth looking at those. It's a basic sector wipe with specific bit patterns for each pass to maximise the impact on any magnetic imprint on the drive.
Any way you can then show the effectiveness of 1,4,8,32 passes on the magnetic footprint on the drive (given you're doing forensics) may be a better project.
As your degree is about the forensics rather than the engineering - I would look at the value in terms of forensics first.
I'd stick to one platform. Implement something and then (if you have the gear) reseat the platters in equipment capable of reading the magnetic tracks directly. Then look at the difference between them (assuming you can reseat the platters back into the drive again!).
If you're erasing the drive completely it doesn't matter which filing system it is - a disk wide wipe should ensure the entire FS structure is also wiped.
You could do the wiper software in a day (literally), measuring the effectiveness directly from the drive is a different matter..
Another suggestion is show how you'd expect the impact to occur - do the testing - then show what you have measured.
I'd stick to one platform. Implement something and then (if you have the gear) reseat the platters in equipment capable of reading the magnetic tracks directly. Then look at the difference between them (assuming you can reseat the platters back into the drive again!).
If you're erasing the drive completely it doesn't matter which filing system it is - a disk wide wipe should ensure the entire FS structure is also wiped.
You could do the wiper software in a day (literally), measuring the effectiveness directly from the drive is a different matter..
Another suggestion is show how you'd expect the impact to occur - do the testing - then show what you have measured.
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Whilst you're testing it i'd recommend you set-up a virtual machine using say Virtual Box. That way you can wipe the drive and restore it back to its unwiped state in seconds. Once it's fairly stable you can try it out on a real machine.
For BSc I think you'll only need to show the process, understanding what you expect and showing what you've observed.
If you were doing a Masters/PhD then I would have thought that would go into the reverse engineering of the impact using FFT etc to attempt to recover 1/4/8 for example but that's well beyond what you're doing I suspect.
If you were doing a Masters/PhD then I would have thought that would go into the reverse engineering of the impact using FFT etc to attempt to recover 1/4/8 for example but that's well beyond what you're doing I suspect.
my idea was to create a software which can perform several different type of wipes (standard wipes like guntman etc) across multiple fs on an array of thumb disk 's and then prove their effective ness by reverse engineering and suggest possible improvements to them etc and bable on about the effectiveness as well as how easy it is for criminals etc , i wanted to create it to load into memory etc ....
Soldato
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What you have to remember is that when you overwrite a disk sector, it is impossible to retrieve the previous data by use of software means.
The only way to recover it is by using proprietary hardware in a Lab.
So a 1 pass overwrite as long as it writes to every sector on a disk will mean that you will not manage to retrieve any data off that disk unless you have specialist equipment.
IIRC with flash based drives one write is all you need also to perminantly scrub data so neither software nor hardware can retrieve it (but I'm not 100% sure on this)
The only way to recover it is by using proprietary hardware in a Lab.
So a 1 pass overwrite as long as it writes to every sector on a disk will mean that you will not manage to retrieve any data off that disk unless you have specialist equipment.
IIRC with flash based drives one write is all you need also to perminantly scrub data so neither software nor hardware can retrieve it (but I'm not 100% sure on this)