Washing and Cleaning your Privacy Items provides a high level of security and
should generally be enough to prevent any intruder from breaching your privacy.
However, you should note that deleting items alone may not protect your privacy
from those who are determined to uncover your personal and sensitive information
and are prepared to employ more advanced file recovery methods.
To prevent this Total Privacy offers the most advanced shredding methods available
today to ensure that even if the underlying file system does not physically remove
all remnants of your files, their contents are effectively inaccessible.
No other privacy software offers as many data destruction algorithms as Total Privacy 5.5.
You can choose to shred your files from 10 of the most sophisticated data
destruction algorithms in existence to be certain that your confidential files,
data and information are totally beyond recovery.
Single Pass: The fastest, but least
secured of the data destruction algorithms. Your data is overwritten with zeroes
in a single pass.
Triple Pass: Triple Pass consists of
two complimentary overwriting passes followed by a random pass. This is an extra
security measure that should prevent any particular recovery program retrieving
your data.
U.S. Standard, DoD 5220.22-M (7 passes):
U.S. Department of Defense specifies a seven pass extended character rotation
overwrite algorithm in the DoD 5220.22-M specification. This Total Privacy shredding
method conforms to these overwriting standards as well as method 'd' of the
Cleaning and Sanitation Matrix.
U.S. Navy NAVSO P-5239-26 (RLL) (3 passes):
This shredding method conforms to the U.S. Navy standard and uses three passes
- one flush, one specifically patterned for
RLL
(Run Length Limited encoding scheme as used by SCSI and ATA/IDE disk drives)
and one random.
U.S. Navy NAVSO P-5239-26 (MFM) (3 passes):
This shredding method conforms to the U.S. Navy standard and uses three passes
- one flush, one specifically patterned for
MFM
(Modified Frequency Modulation encoding scheme as used by ST506 style disk drives)
and one random.
U.S. Army AR380-19 (3 passes): AR380-19
is the data destruction level specified and published by the U.S. Army. This
procedure calls for 3 overwriting passes, one random and a character with its
compliment.
German Standard, VSITR (7 passes):
The German standard calls for each sector to be overwritten with three alternating
patterns of 00 and FF and in the last pass with AA.
Russian Standard, GOST P50739-95 (7 passes):
GOST P50739-95 is the purge required by the Russian Federation. This procedure
calls for a single pass of zeroes followed by a single pass of random characters.
Peter Gutman (35 passes): Peter Gutman
suggests methods for ensuring that the recovery of data can be made as difficult
as possible for an attacker by offering the 35 overwrite pass algorithm. This
algorithm is slow, but extremely reliable.
Bruce Schneier (7 passes): The Bruce
Schneier method offers a seven pass overwriting algorithm. The first with all
ones, the second all with zeroes and then five times with a cryptographically
secure pseudo-random sequence.
Note: Activating the shredder could increase washing time significantly.
Generally, the higher the level of shredding and number of passes, the longer the
process takes. Unless government strength security is desired or physical forensic
recovery is feared (e.g. corporate espionage), the single or triple pass methods
are normally sufficient to prevent any program from recovering data.