Privacy issue on PPC

[Stingray]

Hey Guys,
I have a question Lets say that I just bought a PPC, I loaded all sorts of personal information like Contacts, passwords, Ect. Ect. Now 6 months later my PPC carps out one me. Lucky me that I signed on for insurance! Insurance company says “No problem Sir, we will ship out the replacement, just mail us the original one back”. I get my new set, Hard reset the old one and send it back. Now, the question is that what good is a hard reset? Can they still extract out my personal information even after it being deleted? I have done this myself with old hard drives that were formatted! Can this be avoided?

[Big D5]

For secure personal information always use a program like subsembly wallet that encrypts your information and I always save the encrypted file on the storage card. Palm released a cab that dose completely wipe the memory on the 700wx, so I suspect there is a viable security risc on the 700wx any ways. This is probably true on the 6700 as well but I have no fact basis for this. I would think thou that if there was a need, than someone would have already written some type of program to wipe the memory. Mabe someone who knows more about this will share

[xarses]

If we where just dealing with eeprom to store data, like code to run a micro processor, i would not be worried once their electonicly erased the unit is near impossible to recover the original value. where this could be an issue with magnetic disk. where the pysical magnetic media still has 'residue' of the last setting. this is why the DoD destruction of sensitive data want's three random passes over the area to consider it securely erased. So, at a hardware level, i would not be that concerned.

However, because the eeprom has a filesystem on top of it, there may be some room for concern. most of the time when you 'delete' a file only the reference that the file is there is deleted from the File Allocation Table (FAT) this then shows that there is more free space as the space is no longer used by a file. the problem with this is that the file still exists on the disk until its overwritten.

So, what it really comes down to, how the information is erased on the hard reset, is it a quick zero out the FAT or is it actual resetting the eeprom in the area. I would lend to the insecure zeroing of the FAT as it dosen't take very long for the unit to reload (does some one else know?)

What you can do:
If your worried about it and cant find a DoD compliant eraser. hard reset the device, and load data, preferably random, but music would work ok(nice random pattern)(sound recorder would also work[notes]) this will override anything you may have had stored on the device, continue to add stuff until your device complains its full. hard reset and repeat two more times. this would give you the equalivant of a DoD whipe, at least as good as we can do with out an app to do it for us.

On a side note:
ask the insurer how they handle the devices and if they are compliant with secure data erasing procedures.

X

[Stingray]

Originally Posted by xarses

If we where just dealing with eeprom to store data, like code to run a micro processor, i would not be worried once their electonicly erased the unit is near impossible to recover the original value. where this could be an issue with magnetic disk. where the pysical magnetic media still has 'residue' of the last setting. this is why the DoD destruction of sensitive data want's three random passes over the area to consider it securely erased. So, at a hardware level, i would not be that concerned.

However, because the eeprom has a filesystem on top of it, there may be some room for concern. most of the time when you 'delete' a file only the reference that the file is there is deleted from the File Allocation Table (FAT) this then shows that there is more free space as the space is no longer used by a file. the problem with this is that the file still exists on the disk until its overwritten.

So, what it really comes down to, how the information is erased on the hard reset, is it a quick zero out the FAT or is it actual resetting the eeprom in the area. I would lend to the insecure zeroing of the FAT as it dosen't take very long for the unit to reload (does some one else know?)

What you can do:
If your worried about it and cant find a DoD compliant eraser. hard reset the device, and load data, preferably random, but music would work ok(nice random pattern)(sound recorder would also work[notes]) this will override anything you may have had stored on the device, continue to add stuff until your device complains its full. hard reset and repeat two more times. this would give you the equalivant of a DoD whipe, at least as good as we can do with out an app to do it for us.

On a side note:
ask the insurer how they handle the devices and if they are compliant with secure data erasing procedures.

X

Thanks X..... this is a great idea..... this should be made into a sticky....