[17156] in bugtraq
Re: Shred 1.0 Bug Report
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (M. Leo Cooper)
Wed Oct 11 18:34:32 2000
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Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.20.0010102308590.612-100000@localhost>
Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2000 23:43:11 -0700
Reply-To: "M. Leo Cooper" <thegrendel@THERIVER.COM>
From: "M. Leo Cooper" <thegrendel@THERIVER.COM>
X-To: Jeff Harlan <Jeff.Harlan@mail.sprint.com>
To: BUGTRAQ@SECURITYFOCUS.COM
In-Reply-To: <39E33997.94F3F948@mail.sprint.com>
On Tue, 10 Oct 2000, Jeff Harlan wrote:
> Ran a test with Shred v1.0 and found some
> unexpected results. This utility is supposed to
> overwrite a file with several passes of different
> bit patterns followed by one random pattern. The
> file is then unlinked. This is supposed to make
> the file unrecoverable with utilities which read
> raw disk blocks. Using the icat utility from Dan
> Farmer and Wietze Venema's TCT Toolkit it appears
> that the data is not overwritten. This test was
> done on two different RedHat 6.0 systems.
It has been a couple of years since I actively worked on "shred". In
response to your e-mail, Jeff, when I tested the program, it no longer
worked as specified. In fact, when compiled on a glibc 2.1 machine,
"shred" coredumps. It appears that this package is a victim of the
changes made to libc.
I therefore advise discontinuation of the use of the "shred" package. I
have no plans to bugfix or update it, since Tom Vier's "wipe" package
accomplishes the same job, and in a more thorough fashion.
Jeff, I do have to question whether it was appropriate to notify
Bugtraq, since "shred" was never, to my knowledge, a part of any Linux
distribution.
Thanks for the notification.
Mendel
