ShredOS – Secure disk erasure/wipe

Baseless as Prof. Gutmann's never said that 35 (thirtyfive) passes were needed, yet all implementations used those 35 passes, if you prefer the theory is (was) sound, the implementations with 35 passes are (and were and will be) baseless.

What he did was to list 35 possible patterns, each suitable for a given technology (and many of those technologies were already obsolete in 1996 or a couple years after).

In addition/updates to the 1996 paper he himself stated clearly how the article (which to be fair was more than a bit ambiguous) has been largely misread:

https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html

>In the time since this paper was published, some people have treated the 35-pass overwrite technique described in it more as a kind of voodoo incantation to banish evil spirits than the result of a technical analysis of drive encoding techniques. As a result, they advocate applying the voodoo to PRML and EPRML drives even though it will have no more effect than a simple scrubbing with random data. In fact performing the full 35-pass overwrite is pointless for any drive since it targets a blend of scenarios involving all types of (normally-used) encoding technology, which covers everything back to 30+-year-old MFM methods (if you don't understand that statement, re-read the paper). If you're using a drive which uses encoding technology X, you only need to perform the passes specific to X, and you never need to perform all 35 passes. For any modern PRML/EPRML drive, a few passes of random scrubbing is the best you can do. As the paper says, "A good scrubbing with random data will do about as well as can be expected". This was true in 1996, and is still true now. Looking at this from the other point of view, with the ever-increasing data density on disk platters and a corresponding reduction in feature size and use of exotic techniques to record data on the medium, it's unlikely that anything can be recovered from any recent drive except perhaps a single level via basic error-cancelling techniques. In particular the drives in use at the time that this paper was originally written are long since extinct, so the methods that applied specifically to the older, lower-density technology don't apply any more. Conversely, with modern high-density drives, even if you've got 10KB of sensitive data on a drive and can't erase it with 100% certainty, the chances of an adversary being able to find the erased traces of that 10KB in 200GB of other erased traces are close to zero.

Moreover there is no need whatsoever for "few" random passes, one single pass of 0's is the current NIST standard and anything more is "optional" (please read as unneeded).