Data destruction

Encrypt, You Must, But Do It Right!

One of the clients I service has information that falls under HIPPA. Prior to last week, all of the data was stored on a server located behind a strong firewall in a building with good physical security. Last week, however, this organization decided to deploy laptops for their field operatives. Major security problem. Full-drive encryption was my first thought.The good thing is that there was nothing on the laptops except for the OS–they were brand new. Nobody had seen them except me. I was able to encrypt the hard drive before any data had been written, thus insuring that no remnants of unencrypted data exist. Every future write to the hard drive will be encrypted.

If you think about it, this is the safest way to do full drive encryption. But what if you want to re-deploy equipment that has had data on it? In this case, you’ll want to first wipe the drive using a good tool like Darik’s Boot and Nuke (DBAN) or CMRR’s Secure Erase, depending on the sensitivity of the data. DBAN will let you write multiple passes of pseudorandom data, which is usually “good enough.” Then, reinstall your OS of choice and run your full drive encryption program assigning a passphrase at least 20 characters long (mine’s 45). All this working of the drive should sufficiently scramble any data remnants.

Paranoid About Hard Drive Security? Try This

My company serves as the IT department for several medical, legal, social service, and banking organizations in our area. I don’t have to tell you that every one of these organizations deals with information that falls under various government data security and privacy acts. Every one of these organizations depends on and expects us to put in place measures to protect their data. In other words, if they suffer a breach, they’re going to assign responsibility to us on some level. So, when I decommission a server or PC, I take steps to make sure that no one is going to be able to read anything off the hard drives. Call me paranoid, but consider this: seven in 10 secondhand hard drives still have data. What’s one to do?

It’s well known that simply wiping out partitions and re-formatting drives doesn’t erase anything. It’s equally well known that overwriting every sector with pseudo-random data is considered a secure method of erasure. I give you a two-step approach that may be overkill, but is certainly a procedure that any court would consider a mitigating factor if I or my company is accused of negligence. (I work in a Microsoft environment, so that is the context here.)

Step one is to install TrueCrypt 5, (my hands-down favorite) or another full-drive encryption program, and perform the steps for full-drive encryption; this effectively writes pseudo-random noise to every sector of the hard drive. (Don’t fret about the 20-character password TrueCrypt warns you about–just type “password.” You’re not worried about logon security; you just want to encrypt the hard drive.) This one-pass encryption is probably sufficient for a home PC hard drive, but not for anything else.

Step two is to run a disk erase program that overwrites every sector with pseudo-random bits. I use Darik’s Boot and Nuke (DBAN), without question a best-of-breed open source program. One pass auto-wipe should be sufficient since you’re overwriting what already amounts to pseudo-random noise (created by TrueCrypt) on the hard disk.

After this treatment, any adversary would find it virtually impossible to recover anything usable off of the drive. Give it away, sell it on eBay, do whatever.

And have a good night’s sleep.