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Is it fair to _ever_ say that clearing the history completely removes all traces of visited sites? I have always operated under the assumption that some trace w
by bb123 6y ago
Is it fair to _ever_ say that clearing the history completely removes all traces of visited sites? I have always operated under the assumption that some trace will remain pretty much forever.
- jonathanstrange 6y agoWhy would you make this assumption? It seems perfectly reasonable to me to assume, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, that a program actually does what it claims to do.
- rydre 6y agoI sometimes do computer forensics for clients and you can be sure that you leave traces. You'd need to wipe out the area of the disk over and over again to fully remove it (sometimes it'll still remain despite that, for undisclosed reasons).
- bartread 6y agoAsking because I don't know: does that also hold true for SSDs if the sectors are overwritten (either with new data, or due to wear levelling)?
- rydre 6y agoCorrect. None of the publicly/commercially available software can do that, so don't worry most people won't pay for it.
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y agosecure erase is the only way to clear all sectors on an SSD but at that point you're just relying on the manufacturer's implementation (and past experience from encryption has ruled that to be a derp). an easy alternative is just to encrypt the drive using software-based encryption and just delete the key. Windows 10 has now stopped relying on hardware-based ssd encryption because it was found some of it was just garbage. Edit: Additional caveats: some drives can move data in and out of the non-system viewable area and dead cells cannot be written if they're no longer viable so data can still remain there.
- bartread 6y agoThanks: helpful to know.
- jonathanstrange 6y agoyes I know, even the Gutmann wipe is no longer effective and SSDs are essentially unwipeable, but that's not what this is about. It's about the software not wiping (or not even deleting) data at all when you'd expect it to do so. Generally, you'd expect software to do what it tells you.
- canofbars 6y agoThe best way to wipe an SSD is to have full disk encryption and then wipe the key off the ssd. Even if you do manage to recover the key which is a big if, you still need the key in your brain. Combined with writing random data over the ssd you will be lucky to pull anything out of it.
- giancarlostoro 6y agoOr fill it with some AAA Steam games shouldnt take long to fill the whole thing.
- gruez 6y agoI'm not sure why you'd want to do that, considering that it's inefficient (it requires internet access, and it's capped by its speed), and you're rolling the dice on whether it's wiped or not. eg. if you have 100GB of free space to wipe, and the closest you can get to 100GB with your steam games is 95GB, then there's a 5% chance that your data would still be on the disk. Doing something like cat /dev/urandom > /path/to/mount/point/temp.bin && fysnc && rm /path/to/mount/point/temp.bin is much more reliable and isn't dependent on your internet.
- fearingreprisal 6y agoWhy would any of these suggestions be better than the following? dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdX bs=1M
- jerf 6y agoSimply filling the disk by any means runs the risk of your incriminating (or whatever) information being retained in a sector that got remapped out from under you that you can no longer write to. Wiping the encryption key takes care of that problem, as well as being much faster.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- willis936 6y ago“undisclosed reasons” There comes a point where I simply won’t believe in magic. Whether it’s 3 writes or 7 writes, at some point there is not enough contextual information left on rigid magnetic media to recover any amount of useable information.
- giancarlostoro 6y agoThey might be referring to SSDs which would also be bad to do overwrites on since you are essentially killing the life of the drive. Better off just outright filling up a whole drive.
- 867-5309 6y agothat seems a little naive. what about actual evidence of performing said wipe? a little progress bar showing the 35× overwrite technique maybe, verified by a failed recovery. do any browsers have these small, open source capabilities baked in? seems like nowadays the only way to ensure and audit personal privacy is by having network inspection and disk utilities constantly monitoring these "pro-privacy" apps
- boomboomsubban 6y agoStore browsing data in memory. That said, data being available to forensic level HD recovery is very different from data still being used to populate the most visited sites.
- 867-5309 6y agostoring in memory would only provide browsing data for the current session, permanent storage of history is not possible without writing to disk
- boomboomsubban 6y agoThat would provide fairly strong evidence that it was actually being deleted.
- 867-5309 6y agoif what you are referring to were possible
- boomboomsubban 6y agoIt's not really hard, you just want a system that let's you save your history through a reboot.
- 867-5309 6y ago
- bb123 6y agoBecause it is a well known fact that it is trivially easy for a resourced attacker to retrieve data from a storage medium well after your computer claims it is deleted.
- techntoke 6y agoNot if it is securely wiped multiple times. At that point they'll go looking at your DNS provider and ISP, or local fusion center.
- bb123 6y agoRight, but my browser isn't doing that. Therefore the original point still stands.
- techntoke 6y ago> Because it is a well known fact that it is trivially easy for a resourced attacker to retrieve data from a storage medium well after your computer claims it is deleted. No it isn't. You said nothing about a browser. You said storage medium.