3 ms·
Because it is conceivable that you could extract patterns from the underlying data because you know what the highly correlated, short-cycle writing pattern was.
by bsder 3y ago
Because it is conceivable that you could extract patterns from the underlying data because you know what the highly correlated, short-cycle writing pattern was.
In reality, genuinely writing (as opposed to just pretending it was written which is a hazard on any modern storage) any single byte (even just all 0 or all 255) to every position on the disk seems to be more than sufficient to thwart even the NSA.
- tczajka 3y agoIsn't it also similarly conceivable that if you write a predictable PRNG sequence such the outputs of Mersenne Twister you could also potentially extract patterns? Mersenne Twister is essentially as predictable as a short cycle.
- bsder 3y agoCorrelating a short cycle is much more difficult than correlating a long cycle even if you have complete information about the long cycle. If the bits on the disk have a pattern, it is much more likely to repeat against a short cycle. However, as I pointed out, it's all pretty much moot. I've never seen anybody cough up evidence that a disk could be recovered after even a single write with merely zeroes. In fact, there was a competition and prize for a while that could be won if you could demonstrated reconstruction of a disk after even a single platter write. Nobody ever managed to claim it.