Tails

As pointed out in the forum, former versions of our documentation on secure deletion, was wrongly stating that overwriting twice the available diskspace [on a USB or solid-state drive] is usually, but not always, sufficient to securely clean the drive.

This basically says that in order to securely delete a file from a USB you could delete the file and then the run "Wipe available diskspace" even if you have other files on the volume. Which is wrong according to the paper by Wei & al..

We could propose to wipe the entire device and then reformat it. But srm doesn't seem to run on block devices: I get "Warning: /dev/sdc is not a regular file, rename/unlink only!". On the other hand shred seems to work as usual. It is included in Tails but doesn't have a graphical interface.

So we cannot document a GUI procedure to truly wipe a USB stick at the moment.

The documentation was fixed in June.

Now that the plans for nautilus-wipe to be based on diskscrub are abandoned, the most sensible way to fix this would probably be:

1. add an option to wipe with 3 random passes, rather than a mere zero one, to the udisks Format method
2. add access to this feature from Palimpsest, which seems a more appropriate place to trigger destructive operations at the block device level than a Nautilus extension

Next thing to do: report this as wishlist tickets upstream.