WIPE(1) User Commands WIPE(1)
NAME
wipe - securely erase files from magnetic media
SYNOPSIS
wipe [options] path1 path2 ... pathn
CURRENT-VERSION
This manual page describes version 0.22 of wipe , released November
2010.
DESCRIPTION
Recovery of supposedly erased data from magnetic media is easier than
what many people would like to believe. A technique called Magnetic
Force Microscopy (MFM) allows any moderately funded opponent to recover
the last two or three layers of data written to disk; wipe repeatedly
overwrites special patterns to the files to be destroyed, using the
fsync() call and/or the O_SYNC bit to force disk access. In normal
mode, 34 patterns are used (of which 8 are random). These patterns were
recommended in an article from Peter Gutmann (pgut001@cs.auck-
land.ac.nz) entitled "Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-
State Memory". The normal mode takes 35 passes (0-34). A quick mode al-
lows you to use only 4 passes with random patterns, which is of course
much less secure.
NOTE ABOUT JOURNALING FILESYSTEMS AND SOME RECOMMENDATIONS (JUNE 2004)
Journaling filesystems (such as Ext3 or ReiserFS) are now being used by
default by most Linux distributions. No secure deletion program that
does filesystem-level calls can sanitize files on such filesystems, be-
cause sensitive data and metadata can be written to the journal, which
cannot be readily accessed. Per-file secure deletion is better imple-
mented in the operating system.
Encrypting a whole partition with cryptoloop, for example, does not
help very much either, since there is a single key for all the parti-
tion.
Therefore wipe is best used to sanitize a harddisk before giving it to
untrusted parties (i.e. sending your laptop for repair, or selling your
disk). Wiping size issues have been hopefully fixed (I apologize for
the long delay).
Be aware that harddisks are quite intelligent beasts those days. They
transparently remap defective blocks. This means that the disk can
keep an albeit corrupted (maybe slightly) but inaccessible and
unerasable copy of some of your data. Modern disks are said to have
about 100% transparent remapping capacity. You can have a look at re-
cent discussions on Slashdot.
I hereby speculate that harddisks can use the spare remapping area to
secretly make copies of your data. Rising totalitarianism makes this
almost a certitude. It is quite straightforward to implement some sim-
ple filtering schemes that would copy potentially interesting data.
Better, a harddisk can probably detect that a given file is being
wiped, and silently make a copy of it, while wiping the original as in-
structed.
Recovering such data is probably easily done with secret IDE/SCSI com-
mands. My guess is that there are agreements between harddisk manufac-
turers and government agencies. Well-funded mafia hackers should then
be able to find those secret commands too.
Don't trust your harddisk. Encrypt all your data.
Of course this shifts the trust to the computing system, the CPU, and
so on. I guess there are also "traps" in the CPU and, in fact, in ev-
ery sufficiently advanced mass-marketed chip. Wealthy nations can find
those. Therefore these are mainly used for criminal investigation and
"control of public dissent".
People should better think of their computing devices as facilities
lended by the DHS.
IMPORTANT WARNING -- READ CAREFULLY
The author, the maintainers or the contributors of this package can NOT
be held responsible in any way if wipe destroys something you didn't
want it to destroy. Let's make this very clear. I want you to assume
that this is a nasty program that will wipe out parts of your files
that you didn't want it to wipe. So whatever happens after you launch
wipe is your entire responsibility. In particular, no one guarantees
that wipe will conform to the specifications given in this manual page.
Similarly, we cannot guarantee that wipe will actually erase data, or
that wiped data is not recoverable by advanced means. So if nasties
get your secrets because you sold a wiped harddisk to someone you don't
know, well, too bad for you.
The best way to sanitize a storage medium is to subject it to tempera-
tures exceeding 1500K. As a cheap alternative, you might use wipe at
your own risk. Be aware that it is very difficult to assess whether
running wipe on a given file will actually wipe it -- it depends on an
awful lot of factors, such as : the type of file system the file re-
sides on (in particular, whether the file system is a journaling one or
not), the type of storage medium used, and the least significant bit of
the phase of the moon.
Wiping over NFS or over a journalling filesystem (ReiserFS etc.) will
most probably not work.
Therefore I strongly recommend to call wipe directly on the correspond-
ing block device with the appropriate options. However THIS IS AN EX-
TREMELY DANGEROUS THING TO DO. Be sure to be sober. Give the right op-
tions. In particular : don't wipe a whole harddisk (eg. wipe -kD
/dev/hda is bad) since this will destroy your master boot record. Bad
idea. Prefer wiping partitions (eg. wipe -kD /dev/hda2) is good, pro-
vided, of course, that you have backed up all necessary data.
COMMAND-LINE OPTIONS
-f (force; disable confirmation query)
By default wipe will ask for confirmation, indicating the number
of regular and special files and directories specified on the com-
mand line. You must type "yes" for confirmation, "no" for rejec-
tion. You can disable the confirmation query with the -f (force)
option.
-r (recurse into subdirectories)
Will allow the removal of the entire directory tree. Symbolic
links are not followed.
-c (chmod if necessary)
If a file or directory to be wiped has no write permissions set,
will do a chmod to set the permission.
-i (informational, verbose mode)
This enables reporting to stdout. By default all data is written
to stderr.
-s (silent mode)
All messages, except the confirmation prompt and error messages,
are suppressed.
-q (quick wipe)
If this option is used, wipe will only make (by default) 4 passes
on each file, writing random data. See option -Q
-Q <number-of-passes>
Sets the number of passes for quick wiping. Default is 4. This op-
tion requires -q.
-a (abort on error)
The program will exit with EXIT_FAILURE if a non-fatal error is
encountered.
-R (set random device OR random seed command)
With this option which requires an argument you can specify an al-
ternate /dev/random device, or a command who's standard output
will be hashed using MD5-hashed. The distinction can be made using
the -S option.
-S (random seed method)
This option takes a single-character argument, which specifies how
the random device/random seed argument is to be used. The default
random device is /dev/random. It can be set using the -R option.
The possible single-character arguments are:
r If you want the argument to be treated like a regular file/charac-
ter device. This will work with /dev/random, and might also work
with FIFOs and the like.
c If you want the argument to be executed as a command. The output
from the command will be hashed using MD5 to provide the required
seed. See the WIPE_SEEDPIPE environment variable for more info.
p If you want wipe to get its seed by hashing environment variables,
the current date and time, its process id. etc. (the random device
argument will not be used). This is of course the least secure
setting.
-M (select pseudo-random number generator algorithm)
During the random passes, wipe overwrites the target files with a
stream of binary data, created by the following choice of algorithms:
l will use (depending on your system) your libc's random() or rand()
pseudorandom generator. Note that on most systems, rand() is a
linear congruential generator, which is awfully weak. The choice
is made at compile-time with the HAVE_RANDOM define (see the Make-
file).
a will use the Arcfour stream cipher as a PRNG. Arcfour happens to
be compatible with the well-known RC4 cipher. This means that un-
der the same key, Arcfour generates exactly the same stream as
RC4...
r will use the fresh RC6 algorithm as a PRNG; RC6 is keyed with the
128-bit seed, and then a null block is repeatedly encrypted to get
the pseudo-random stream. I guess this should be quite secure. Of
course RC6 with 20 rounds is slower than random(); the compile-
time option WEAK_RC6 allows you to use a 4-round version of RC6,
which is faster. In order to be able to use RC6, wipe must be com-
piled with ENABLE_RC6 defined; see the Makefile for warnings about
patent issues.
In all cases the PRNG is seeded with the data gathered from the
random device (see -R and -S options).
-l <length>
As there can be some problems in determining the actual size of a
block device (as some devices do not even have fixed sizes, such
as floppy disks or tapes), you might need to specify the size of
the device by hand; <length> is the device capacity expressed as a
number of bytes. You can use K (Kilo) to specify multiplication by
1024, M (Mega) to specify multiplication by 1048576, G (Giga) to
specify multiplication by 1073741824 and b (block) to specify mul-
tiplication by 512. Thus
1024 = 2b = 1K
20K33 = 20480+33 = 20513
114M32K = 114*1024*1024+32*1024.
-o <offset>
This allows you to specify an offset inside the file or device to
be wiped. The syntax of <offset> is the same as for the -l option.
-e Use exact file size: do not round up file size to wipe possible
remaining junk on the last block.
-Z Don't try to wipe file sizes by repeatedly halving the file size.
Note that this is only attempted on regular files so there is no
use if you use wipe for cleaning a block or special device.
-X <number>
Skip a given number of passes. This is useful to continue wiping
from a given point when you have been wiping, say, a large disk
and had to interrupt the operation. Used with -x.
-x <pass1>,...,<pass35>
Specify the pass order. When wipe is interrupted, it will print
the current randomly selected pass order permutation and the pass
number as appropriate -x and -X arguments.
-F Don't try to wipe file names. Normally, wipe tries to cover file
names by renaming them; this does NOT guarantee that the physical
location holding the old file name gets overwritten. Furthermore,
after renaming a file, the only way to make sure that the name
change is physically carried out is to call sync (), which flushes
out ALL the disk caches of the system, whereas for ading and writ-
ing one can use the O_SYNC bit to get synchronous I/O for one
file. As sync () is very slow, calling sync () after every rename
() makes filename wiping extremely slow.
-k Keep files: do not unlink the files after they have been overwrit-
ten. Useful if you want to wipe a device, while keeping the device
special file. This implies -F.
-D Dereference symlinks: by default, wipe will never follow symlinks.
If you specify -D however, wipe will consent to, well, wipe the
targets of any symlinks you might happen to name on the command
line. You can't specify both -D and -r (recursive) options, first
because of possible cycles in the symlink-enhanced directory
graph, I'd have to keep track of visited files to guarantee termi-
nation, which, you'll easily admit, is a pain in C, and, second,
for fear of having a (surprise!!) block device buried somewhere
unexpected.
-v Show version information and quit.
-h Display help.
EXAMPLES
wipe -rcf /home/berke/plaintext/
Wipe every file and every directory (option -r) listed under
/home/berke/plaintext/, including /home/berke/plaintext/.
Regular files will be wiped with 34 passes and their sizes will
then be halved a random number of times. Special files (character
and block devices, FIFOs...) will not. All directory entries
(files, special files and directories) will be renamed 10 times
and then unlinked. Things with inappropriate permissions will be
chmod()'ed (option -c). All of this will happen without user con-
firmation (option -f).
wipe -kq /dev/hda3
Assuming /dev/hda3 is the block device corresponding to the third
partition of the master drive on the primary IDE interface, it
will be wiped in quick mode (option -q) i.e. with four random
passes. The inode won't be renamed or unlinked (option -k). Be-
fore starting, it will ask you to type ``yes''.
wipe -kqD /dev/floppy
Since wipe never follows symlinks unless explicitly told to do so,
if you want to wipe /dev/floppy which happens to be a symlink to
/dev/fd0u1440 you will have to specify the -D option. Before
starting, it will ask you to type ``yes''.
wipe -rfi >wipe.log /var/log/*
Here, wipe will recursively (option -r) destroy everything under
/var/log, excepting /var/log. It will not attempt to chmod()
things. It will however be verbose (option -i). It won't ask you
to type ``yes'' because of the -f option.
wipe -kq -l 1440K /dev/fd0
Due to various idiosyncracies of the operating system, it's not
always easy to obtain the number of bytes a given device might
contain (in fact, that quantity can be variable). This is why you
sometimes need to tell wipe the amount of bytes to destroy. That's
what the -l option is for. Plus, you can use b,K,M and G as multi-
pliers, respectively for 2^9 (512), 2^10 (1024 or a Kilo), 2^20 (a
Mega) and 2^30 (a Giga) bytes. You can even combine more than one
multiplier !! So that 1M416K = 1474560 bytes.
BUGS/LIMITATIONS
Wipe should work on harddisks and floppy disks; however the internal
cache of some harddisks might prevent the necessary writes to be done
to the magnetic surface. It would be funny to use it over NFS. Under
CFS (Cryptographic File System) the fsync() call has no effect; wipe
has not much use under it anyway - use wipe directly on the correspond-
ing encrypted files. Also, under Linux, when using a device mounted
thru a loopback device, synchronous I/O does not get propagated
cleanly.
For wiping floppy disks, at least under Linux, there is no way, besides
obscure floppy-driver specific ioctl's to determine the block size of
the disk. In particular, the BLKGETSIZE ioctl is not implemented in the
floppy driver. So, for wiping floppies, you must specify the size of
the floppy disk using the -l option, as in the last example. This op-
tion is normally not needed for other fixed block devices, like IDE and
SCSI devices.
File name wiping is implemented since version 0.12. I don't know how
efficient it is. It first changes the name of the file to a random-
generated name of same length, calls sync (), then changes the name to
a random-generated name of maximal length.
File size wiping is implemented by repeatedly truncating the file to
half of its size, until it becomes empty; sync () is called between
such operations.
Note that it is still not possible to file creation date and permission
bits portably. A wipe utility working at the block device level could
be written using the ext2fs library.
AUTHOR AND LICENCE
Wipe was written by Berke Durak (to find my email address, just type
echo berke1ouvaton2org|tr 12 @. in a shell).
Wipe is released under the conditions of the GNU General Public Li-
cense.
FILES
/dev/random is used by default to seed the pseudo-random number genera-
tors.
ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES
WIPE_SEEDPIPE If set, wipe will execute the command specified in it
(using popen()), and will hash the command's output with the MD5 mes-
sage-digest algorithm to get a 128-bit seed for its PRNG. For example,
on systems lacking a /dev/random device, this variable might be set in
/etc/profile to a shell script which contains various commands such as
ls, ps, who, last, etc. and which are run asynchronously in order to
get an output as less predictable as possible.
SEE ALSO
open(2), fsync(2), sync(8), bdflush(2), update(8), random(3)
Linux Sun Nov 7 09:41:23 EST 2010 WIPE(1)
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