> Does ext2 support secure deletion (freed blocks are overwritten, possibly
> multiple times) rather than just released for reuse? Are there patches available to do this?
It was supported in 1.2 I think, but got lost somewhere between 1.3 and 2.0
during the MM changes.
I would just use a user space utility to do it - in Linux that's
straight-forward because ext2 doesn't suffer from the staying-tail
problem DOS FAT has (except when you use ftruncate()). Of course you
have to make sure too that the sensitive data doesn't stay on the swap
partition.
Another way to remove any traces[1] of deleted files from a fs (needs to
be done as root, otherwise the root-reserved blocks are not covered):
for i in 1 2 3 4 5 ; do cat /dev/urandom > /fs/FILE ; rm /fs/FILE ; done
-Andi
[1] The inodes still stay, but they contain no sensitive data.
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