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Hacking 2000 years from now...

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Re: Hacking 2000 years from now...
Post by The E   » Fri Oct 14, 2016 7:18 am

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pnakasone wrote:Considering what can be a stake their is incentive for people to develop better tools to recover data. A few years from now what is unrecoverable will be recoverable with the right tools.


This is highly unlikely. A secure storage system would start with full drive encryption, and when the drive gets decommissioned, it gets overwritten several times with random data. At the end of that whole process, whatever remains on the drive platters is unrecoverable.

And this doesn't cover the increasingly popular and increasingly cheap solid state drive tech: It's already much harder to recover data from these as it is, add drive encryption on top, and all you're getting back is randomness.
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Re: Hacking 2000 years from now...
Post by Tenshinai   » Fri Oct 14, 2016 1:18 pm

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pnakasone wrote:
Considering what can be a stake their is incentive for people to develop better tools to recover data. A few years from now what is unrecoverable will be recoverable with the right tools.


Actually, that´s probably not so likely.

For the reason that to recover multiple writes on bits from HDDs today already requires electronmicroscopes. And they can´t do it nearly as reliably at all any longer simply because the HDDs writes have become so much more accurate that it has become extremely difficult to pick apart the remains.

Today, 5-7 double(or patterned) overwrites often means the original data can not be recovered any more(and if it can, it´s usually as much luck as anything else, as it normally happens because the write heads are not perfectly aligning themselves on the HDD ).
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Re: Hacking 2000 years from now...
Post by Tenshinai   » Fri Oct 14, 2016 1:23 pm

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The E wrote:...
it gets overwritten several times with random data.

...


Not random, 1s and 0s on a HDD looks different enough that randomised overwrites may allow some data to be recovered.

What you do is you write all 1s and all 0s alternately several times, or you use a pattern overwrite that overwrites the whole HDD several times according to predetermined patterns that are optimised to make recovery insanely hard. Then you may finish with one or two runthroughs with random data on top of that.

This takes longer time than doing the "several times with random data", but it is more reliable.
(in effect, you´re doing twice as many overwrites)
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Re: Hacking 2000 years from now...
Post by JohnRoth   » Fri Oct 14, 2016 2:24 pm

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The E wrote:
pnakasone wrote:Considering what can be a stake their is incentive for people to develop better tools to recover data. A few years from now what is unrecoverable will be recoverable with the right tools.


This is highly unlikely. A secure storage system would start with full drive encryption, and when the drive gets decommissioned, it gets overwritten several times with random data. At the end of that whole process, whatever remains on the drive platters is unrecoverable.

And this doesn't cover the increasingly popular and increasingly cheap solid state drive tech: It's already much harder to recover data from these as it is, add drive encryption on top, and all you're getting back is randomness.


Actually, if you're following US Federal government standards for decomissioning drives that had classified data, you destroy the drive. It's pretty difficult to recover anything from a lump of slag that's gotten the thermite treatment. Although I gather that in RL, people use shredders or sledgehammers.
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Re: Hacking 2000 years from now...
Post by Tenshinai   » Fri Oct 14, 2016 10:46 pm

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JohnRoth wrote:
Actually, if you're following US Federal government standards for decomissioning drives that had classified data, you destroy the drive. It's pretty difficult to recover anything from a lump of slag that's gotten the thermite treatment. Although I gather that in RL, people use shredders or sledgehammers.


Fun fact about that? If someone REALLY wants to recover the data, it is often possible to do so from "fragmented" or crushed HDDs.

IF you have the crapload of cash to pay for it and all the pieces.
Even a couple of overwrites with a good program is more effective than smashing a drive.
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Re: Hacking 2000 years from now...
Post by crewdude48   » Sat Oct 15, 2016 12:20 am

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Tenshinai wrote:
JohnRoth wrote:
Actually, if you're following US Federal government standards for decomissioning drives that had classified data, you destroy the drive. It's pretty difficult to recover anything from a lump of slag that's gotten the thermite treatment. Although I gather that in RL, people use shredders or sledgehammers.


Fun fact about that? If someone REALLY wants to recover the data, it is often possible to do so from "fragmented" or crushed HDDs.

IF you have the crapload of cash to pay for it and all the pieces.
Even a couple of overwrites with a good program is more effective than smashing a drive.


It has been a while since I read the instructions, but when I was in, Navy policy was a software wipe and then 3 or more drill holes for secret and software wipe and hammer until no piece is larger than 1/4 inch for top secret. At a minimum. The instruction also included several other options, some including large explosions.

One of my friends was IT on a ship, and they broke theirs in to chunks and literally droped them into the Mariana Trench. Don't think anybody will get any thing from those soon. I suspect that the Honorverse has something similar, where they just drop it into the local star.
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Re: Hacking 2000 years from now...
Post by Joat42   » Sat Oct 15, 2016 10:32 am

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How to wipe a hard-disk permanently:

Drill holes, pour in acid, wait, rinse, shred. If you shred first you don't need the drill but then the acid also acts on other stuff which makes it harder to recycle the leftovers.

Questions?

---
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Re: Hacking 2000 years from now...
Post by George J. Smith   » Sat Oct 15, 2016 10:47 am

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Joat42 wrote:How to wipe a hard-disk permanently:

Drill holes, pour in acid, wait, rinse, shred. If you shred first you don't need the drill but then the acid also acts on other stuff which makes it harder to recycle the leftovers.

Questions?



What about using the electromagnetic grab in a scrap yard :lol:
.
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Re: Hacking 2000 years from now...
Post by aairfccha   » Sat Oct 15, 2016 12:32 pm

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Tenshinai wrote:Not random, 1s and 0s on a HDD looks different enough that randomised overwrites may allow some data to be recovered.


Not reliably any more, the computer magazine c't did some research recently. Conclusion: Overwritten data on modern HDDs is pretty much gone. Recovering small random scraps might be possible but it's unlikely to be of any real use.

One reference is an updated paper by Peter Gutmann: Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory
In the time since this paper was published, some people have treated the 35-pass overwrite technique described in it more as a kind of voodoo incantation to banish evil spirits than the result of a technical analysis of drive encoding techniques. As a result, they advocate applying the voodoo to PRML and EPRML drives even though it will have no more effect than a simple scrubbing with random data. In fact performing the full 35-pass overwrite is pointless for any drive since it targets a blend of scenarios involving all types of (normally-used) encoding technology [...]. If you're using a drive which uses encoding technology X, you only need to perform the passes specific to X, and you never need to perform all 35 passes. For any modern PRML/EPRML drive, a few passes of random scrubbing is the best you can do.[...]

Looking at this from the other point of view, with the ever-increasing data density on disk platters and a corresponding reduction in feature size and use of exotic techniques to record data on the medium, it's unlikely that anything can be recovered from any recent drive except perhaps a single level via basic error-cancelling techniques. In particular the drives in use at the time that this paper was originally written are long since extinct, so the methods that applied specifically to the older, lower-density technology don't apply any more. Conversely, with modern high-density drives, even if you've got 10KB of sensitive data on a drive and can't erase it with 100% certainty, the chances of an adversary being able to find the erased traces of that 10KB in 200GB of other erased traces are close to zero.


Here is the literature list for the c't article.

Even better/worse is shingled magnetic recording where a single complete overwrite pass actually erases each spot (at least across most of the disc) several times due to the way SMR works.
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Re: Hacking 2000 years from now...
Post by Tenshinai   » Sat Oct 15, 2016 1:32 pm

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crewdude48 wrote:
It has been a while since I read the instructions, but when I was in, Navy policy was a software wipe and then 3 or more drill holes for secret and software wipe and hammer until no piece is larger than 1/4 inch for top secret. At a minimum. The instruction also included several other options, some including large explosions.

One of my friends was IT on a ship, and they broke theirs in to chunks and literally droped them into the Mariana Trench. Don't think anybody will get any thing from those soon. I suspect that the Honorverse has something similar, where they just drop it into the local star.


Drillholes is one of the thing that works well, because of how it completely shreds the part of the platters being drilled, that not just does the material end up a random mess, apparently the drilling action also scrambles the magnetisation as well on the material drilled out.




#####

What about using the electromagnetic grab in a scrap yard :lol:


Surprisingly, that is actually not at all foolproof!
It creates a strong magnetic field yes, but it´s an even field that affects the platters the same all over, so the bits become distorted but often NOT erased or unrecoverable.
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