Re: Wiping Swap Partitions

[Ben Slusky <sluskyb@paranoiacs.org>]

On Tue, 06 May 2003 10:28:16 -0700, Sam Simpson wrote:
> I'm thinking of using the following on shutdown:
> 
> swapoff -a
> dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda1 bs=1024k count=64
> sync
> mkswap /dev/hda1
> sync
> swapon -a
> 
> (after checking that hda1 is swap ;).  Any comments or improvements?

Maybe use shred instead of dd there. Overwriting swap once doesn't do such
a great job of destroying the data; if you assume that someone's going to
steal your computer and extract the hard drive then you should assume they
can get past that. ;-)

Or just use encrypted swap.

> Does anyone know if there is a recommended way of doing this under
> Solaris? I guess you can do the same kind of thing, but because of the C2
> rating there should be a way of automating this?

Nah. You must be under the impression that a C2 rating says something
meaningful about a system's overall security. It doesn't.

-- 
Ben Slusky                 | If Apollo 13 went off course today 
sluskyb@stwing.org         | [they'd] open the airlock, flush
sluskyb@paranoiacs.org     | the astronauts out, and re-install
PGP keyID ADA44B3B         | new ones.  -Kibo
-
Linux-crypto:  cryptography in and on the Linux system
Archive:       http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-crypto/