NAME

sswap - secure swap wiper (secure_deletion toolkit)

SYNOPSIS

sswap [-f] [-l] [-l] [-v] [-z] swapdevice

DESCRIPTION

sswap is designed to delete data which may lie still on your swapspace in a secure manner which can not be recovered by thiefs, law enforcement or other threats. The wipe algorythm is based on the paper "Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory" presented at the 6th Usenix Security Symposium by Peter Gutmann, one of the leading civilian cryptographers.

The secure data deletion process of sswap goes like this:

*: 1 pass with 0xff
*: 5 random passes. /dev/urandom is used for a secure RNG if available.
*: 27 passes with special values defined by Peter Gutmann.
*: 5 random passes. /dev/urandom is used for a secure RNG if available.

COMMANDLINE OPTIONS

-f: fast (and insecure mode): no /dev/urandom, no synchronize mode.
-l: lessens the security. Only two passes are written: one mode with 0xff and a final mode with random values.
-l: -l for a second time lessons the security even more: only one pass with random values is written.
-v: verbose mode
-z: wipes the last write with zeros instead of random data

BEWARE

swapoff: unmount your swapspace before using this tool! Otherwise your system might crash!
BETA!: sswap is still beta. It was only tested on Linux but on this system it performed it's work all of the time.

BUGS

No bugs. There was never a bug in the secure_deletion package (in contrast to my other tools, whew, good luck ;-) Send me any that you find. Patches are nice too :)

AUTHOR

van Hauser / THC <vh@thc.org>

DISTRIBUTION

The newest version of the secure_deletion package can be obtained from http://www.thc.org

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; Version 2.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.