Need: Secure file shredding

[Marou]

In a journaling filesystem like ext3 or reiserfs. I know about dd's, and shred, but those are only really effective on ext2.

Lacking any known journal compatible shredder, how much slower is ext2 than ext3? Do you think running an encrypted ext3 / would be faster or slower than a non-encrypted ext2?

Thanks in advance for the info

[i92guboj]

In a journaling filesystem like ext3 or reiserfs. I know about dd's, and shred, but those are only really effective on ext2.

Lacking any known journal compatible shredder, how much slower is ext2 than ext3? Do you think running an encrypted ext3 / would be faster or slower than a non-encrypted ext2?

Thanks in advance for the info

I don't understand your question.

You can use dd to fill the files with /dev/random before deleting them. That should take care of all the previous data on the files. I can't see why the filesystem would have something to do with this. If you are worried about cached writes and such, most filesystems can be configured to write synchronously.

About ext2 vs encrypted ext3... Obviously, no journal and no encryption is faster and lighter on cpu than journaled + encrypted.

[bigtomrodney]

You can also use GPG to shred files as far as I know (?)

[oz]

Need: Secure file shredding

Check out wipe to see if it would work for your needs.

[Marou]

Thanks for the replies, but none of these are really accomplishing what I am looking for. Allow me to explain. I have encrypted volumes. Under windows, using a combination of readily available tools I can mount an encrypted volume, work on the content in it including writing new stuff that gets temporarily cached in non-encrypted space; and then clean all traces of the volume content and new files to the extent that I can't locate the files or metadata with a raw hex search of the drive showing that they even exist when I'm done - using the following progs in conjunction with each other. MRU Blaster + CCleaner (overwrite) for registry/temp, Registry Defrag, free space and unused cluster head/mft (NTFS journal data) shred via Eraser, and TrueCrypt TCTemp for random keyed swap initialized on boot.

I want to replicate this capability on linux and have been unable to do so using any of the tools I can find out there. I think in theory it should be easier on Linux since it doesn't do stupid crap like the registry, or index.dat files. But, its really been the lack of utilities to clean out/shred unnecessary journal segments thats been whats missing for me.

As a side note in journal mode ext3 (see wiki) writes file chunks in addition to metadata to the journal before it writes them to disk. Also, after noting how many open source apps create their own version of MRU lists only in their own locations I don't dislike the windows registry as much as I once did.

[Marsolin]

I'm not sure if they will meet your needs, but NCrypt and Sweeper are a couple other apps you could look at.

[kai12]

I want to replicate this capability on linux and have been unable to do so using any of the tools I can find out there.

could you tell us how far you got with these tools?
what is it you cannot do? for example, can you still »locate the files or metadata« after shredding or wiping them?

i probably cannot offer any help, but you got me curious.
cheers, kai

[Marou_]

Opps on losing my password... O.o

Anyways, just an update; I finally found tools to do what I want, in the secure-delete package from thc.org; which was in the Debian repository.