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shred: Remove files more securelyshred overwrites devices or files, to help prevent even
very expensive hardware from recovering the data.
Ordinarily when you remove a file (see rm invocation), the data is not actually destroyed. Only the index listing where the file is stored is destroyed, and the storage is made available for reuse. There are undelete utilities that will attempt to reconstruct the index and can bring the file back if the parts were not reused.
On a busy system with a nearly-full drive, space can get reused in a few seconds. But there is no way to know for sure. If you have sensitive data, you may want to be sure that recovery is not possible by actually overwriting the file with non-sensitive data.
However, even after doing that, it is possible to take the disk back to a laboratory and use a lot of sensitive (and expensive) equipment to look for the faint “echoes” of the original data underneath the overwritten data. If the data has only been overwritten once, it’s not even that hard.
The best way to remove something irretrievably is to destroy the media
it’s on with acid, melt it down, or the like. For cheap removable media
like floppy disks, this is the preferred method. However, hard drives
are expensive and hard to melt, so the shred utility tries
to achieve a similar effect non-destructively.
This uses many overwrite passes, with the data patterns chosen to maximize the damage they do to the old data. While this will work on floppies, the patterns are designed for best effect on hard drives. For more details, see the source code and Peter Gutmann’s paper Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory, from the proceedings of the Sixth USENIX Security Symposium (San Jose, California, July 22–25, 1996).
Please note that shred relies on a very important assumption:
that the file system overwrites data in place. This is the traditional
way to do things, but many modern file system designs do not satisfy this
assumption. Exceptions include:
data=journal mode),
BFS, NTFS, etc., when they are configured to journal data.
In the particular case of ext3 file systems, the above disclaimer applies (and
shred is thus of limited effectiveness) only in data=journal
mode, which journals file data in addition to just metadata. In both
the data=ordered (default) and data=writeback modes,
shred works as usual. Ext3 journaling modes can be changed
by adding the data=something option to the mount options for a
particular file system in the /etc/fstab file, as documented in
the mount man page (man mount).
If you are not sure how your file system operates, then you should assume that it does not overwrite data in place, which means that shred cannot reliably operate on regular files in your file system.
Generally speaking, it is more reliable to shred a device than a file,
since this bypasses the problem of file system design mentioned above.
However, even shredding devices is not always completely reliable. For
example, most disks map out bad sectors invisibly to the application; if
the bad sectors contain sensitive data, shred won’t be able to
destroy it.
shred makes no attempt to detect or report this problem, just as
it makes no attempt to do anything about backups. However, since it is
more reliable to shred devices than files, shred by default does
not truncate or remove the output file. This default is more suitable
for devices, which typically cannot be truncated and should not be
removed.
Finally, consider the risk of backups and mirrors.
File system backups and remote mirrors may contain copies of the
file that cannot be removed, and that will allow a shredded file
to be recovered later. So if you keep any data you may later want
to destroy using shred, be sure that it is not backed up or mirrored.
shred [option]… file[…]
The program accepts the following options. Also see Common options.
Override file permissions if necessary to allow overwriting.
By default, shred uses 3 passes of
overwrite. You can reduce this to save time, or increase it if you think it’s
appropriate. After 25 passes all of the internal overwrite patterns will have
been used at least once.
Use file as a source of random data used to overwrite and to choose pass ordering. See Random sources.
Shred the first bytes bytes of the file. The default is to shred the whole file. bytes can be followed by a size specification like ‘K’, ‘M’, or ‘G’ to specify a multiple. See Block size.
After shredding a file, truncate it (if possible) and then remove it. If a file has multiple links, only the named links will be removed. Often the file name is less sensitive than the file data, in which case the optional how parameter, supported with the long form option, gives control of how to more efficiently remove each directory entry. The ‘unlink’ parameter will just use a standard unlink call, ‘wipe’ will also first obfuscate bytes in the name, and ‘wipesync’ will also sync each obfuscated byte in the name to disk. Note ‘wipesync’ is the default method, but can be expensive, requiring a sync for every character in every file. This can become significant with many files, or is redundant if your file system provides synchronous metadata updates.
Display to standard error all status updates as sterilization proceeds.
By default, shred rounds the size of a regular file up to the next
multiple of the file system block size to fully erase the slack space in
the last block of the file. This space may contain portions of the current
system memory on some systems for example.
Use --exact to suppress that behavior.
Thus, by default if you shred a 10-byte regular file on a system with 512-byte
blocks, the resulting file will be 512 bytes long. With this option,
shred does not increase the apparent size of the file.
Normally, the last pass that shred writes is made up of
random data. If this would be conspicuous on your hard drive (for
example, because it looks like encrypted data), or you just think
it’s tidier, the --zero option adds an additional overwrite pass with
all zero bits. This is in addition to the number of passes specified
by the --iterations option.
You might use the following command to erase all trace of the file system you’d created on the floppy disk in your first drive. That command takes about 20 minutes to erase a “1.44MB” (actually 1440 KiB) floppy.
shred --verbose /dev/fd0
Similarly, to erase all data on a selected partition of your hard disk, you could give a command like this:
shred --verbose /dev/sda5
On modern disks, a single pass should be adequate, and it will take one third the time of the default three-pass approach.
# 1 pass, write pseudo-random data; 3x faster than the default shred --verbose -n1 /dev/sda5
To be on the safe side, use at least one pass that overwrites using pseudo-random data. I.e., don’t be tempted to use ‘-n0 --zero’, in case some disk controller optimizes the process of writing blocks of all zeros, and thereby does not clear all bytes in a block. Some SSDs may do just that.
A file of ‘-’ denotes standard output. The intended use of this is to shred a removed temporary file. For example:
i=$(mktemp) exec 3<>"$i" rm -- "$i" echo "Hello, world" >&3 shred - >&3 exec 3>-
However, the command ‘shred - >file’ does not shred the contents
of file, since the shell truncates file before invoking
shred. Use the command ‘shred file’ or (if using a
Bourne-compatible shell) the command ‘shred - 1<>file’ instead.
An exit status of zero indicates success, and a nonzero value indicates failure.
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