Wipe and Rails? (secure file deletes)

Rails
1

Hi,

I want to use secure file deletes in my app so that the files are
irretrievable after deletion (the files contain personal health
information). My hosting service has Wipe installed
(http://wipe.sourceforge.net/). I’d really appreciate hearing from
anyone who has any experience with doing secure file deletes within a
Rails app. Is Wipe the best tool to use? I’ve never used any of the
utilities that are out there for this.

Thanks,
Bill

2

Bill W. wrote:

I want to use secure file deletes in my app so that the files are
irretrievable after deletion (the files contain personal health
information). My hosting service has Wipe installed
(http://wipe.sourceforge.net/). I’d really appreciate hearing from anyone
who has any experience with doing secure file deletes within a Rails app.
Is Wipe the best tool to use? I’ve never used any of the utilities that
are out there for this.

Don’t you have ‘shred’ from the command line? Would this work?

system(“shred insecure_file.dat -zu &”)

Note the command detaches with &, so a slow shred won’t slow down your
server’s response.

And note that you cannot guarantee security like this; you must start
with
your server’s physical security. All kinds of artifacts from the
information
will remain on your hard drive.

–
Phlip
"Pigleg too?", week 1

3

Hi Phlip,
Phlip wrote:

Don’t you have ‘shred’ from the command line?
Would this work?

system(“shred insecure_file.dat -zu &”)

Note the command detaches with &, so a slow
shred won’t slow down your server’s response.

Thanks for the note on ‘&’. I just checked and shred is available, but
I
didn’t know about the detach option. I’ve been looking for something
asynchronous to avoid a negative impact to the visitor experience. I
was
also hoping for something that was more integral to the file system. Do
you
have any experience with srm? (http://srm.sourceforge.net/ )

And note that you cannot guarantee security like this;
you must start with your server’s physical security.
All kinds of artifacts from the information will remain
on your hard drive.

This is my first ‘dive’ into this and, yeah, it’s pretty complicated.
Looks
like I need to know, at a minimum, the type of devices in use, the setup
of
the devices wrt RAID, and the file system in use. I’m beginning to
wonder
if my goals are achievable on an VPS setup. Any experience / opinions
much
appreciated.

Best regards,
Bill