Wipe2fs is a tool designed to help security-minded administrators to clear the data left in unused spaces in ext2/3 filesystems. The goal of wipe2fs is to prevent both software and physical data recoveries from uncovering the data that you want erased.
Several tools, such as wipe(1) and sterilize(1), have been developed to perform secure file deletions. These tools overwrite the files with pseudo-random numbers and special data patterns, so that physical data recovery through electronic tunneling microscopes becomes less likely. The downside of these tools is that they need to be specifically invoked for file deletion, and programs that process sensitive information (such as mail readers that create temp files) rarely take advantage of them. To make sure that no sensitive data are left on the media, the user must back up all useful data and then overwrite the entire filesystem. This is too expensive in a production environment, and therefore nobody does it.
With wipe2fs, you can accomplish such tasks with relative ease. Just make sure that the information you want to destroy no longer exists in any files in the filesystem (thus is not left in any of the spaces used by the filesystem), unmount the filesystem, and run wipe2fs on it. All data in unused portions of the filesystem will then be wiped out, while other files and filesystem data structures remain intact.
You should not use wipe2fs on mounted filesystems. Even though there are no known bugs, you should backup all data before proceeding to avoid potential data losses.
Version 0.2.1 of wipe2fs was released on January 23, 2005. Version 0.2.0 released earlier contains a bug that causes wipe2fs to refuse writing to any filesystem, therefore it should not be used.
You must have libext2fs on your system to compile and use wipe2fs. Since the program works in user space, kernel support for ext2/3 filesystems is not needed. Currently wipe2fs has only been tested on Linux, but it should be portable to other Unix systems.
To build and install wipe2fs, use "./configure ; make ; make install" and everything should be all set.
Wipe2fs is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License. Only the source package is offered; you should build the binary yourself.
wipe2fs.lsm (596 Bytes)
wipe2fs-0.2.1.tar.gz (149 KB)
wipe2fs-0.2.0.tar.gz (149 KB)
wipe2fs-0.1.0.tar.gz (324 KB)
Please send comments, suggestions, and bug reports to me.