Wipe is a secure file wiping utility.
It is based on work by Peter Gutmann.
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 entitled “Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory”. A quick mode allows you to use only 4 passes with random patterns, which is of course much less secure.
Website: wipe.sourceforge.net
Support:
Developer: Tom Vier
License: GNU General Public License
Wipe is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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