Wipe is a secure file wiping utility. However, it does not set the media access bit on scsi commands, therefore it is not 100% secure, unless your drive has no write cache. For maximum security, disable drive write cache on scsi mode page 8. If possible, disable operating system file cache and driver-level buffers. Wipe tries to sync the data to disk via a call to fdatasync(), fsync(), or using O_SYNC. Under linux, the mount option "mand" must be used (see /usr/src/linux/Documentation/mandatory.txt) for mandatory file locks to be enabled. Wipe should make it extremely difficult for all but the most determined person(s) to recover the original plaintext data. Utilities such as PGP and the GNU Privacy Guard provide strong encryption, but encryption is useless if the original plaintext can be recovered.

For more information on the secure deletion of magnetic media and solid state storage devices (such as DRAM) see the USENIX article at:

local copy
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/secure_del.html

Wipe uses /dev/urandom, or if unavailable, /dev/random, as a source for entropy. The tiger hash is used for speed. For more information on the tiger hash algorithm is at:
http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/~biham/Reports/Tiger/

Wipe previously used the Mersenne Twister:

http://www.math.keio.ac.jp/~matumoto/emt.html

Febuary 28, 2000
Wipe 1.2.2 release. Fixed up block device code, and some other minor fixes. I've tested blockdev wiping under linux and it seems to work pretty well. Let me know if it's broken on BSD or solaris, irix, etc.

Febuary 12, 2000
Wipe 1.2.1 release. Fixes a typo that prevented ioctl() from being used.

January 5, 2000
Wipe 1.2.0 is out! This version should be much more stable (see changelog). Older versions have buggy hash IO code. Here's the fix.

This is the new site. As you can tell, not quite everything is setup yet.

Send bugs, suggestions, and comments to nester