[Cryptography] Ex-CIA Joshua Schulte Describes His Data/Crypto Hiding Prowess

[Stephan Neuhaus]

On 3/2/20 9:29 PM, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> On Mon, 2 Mar 2020, Stephan Neuhaus wrote:
> 
>>> (And even then, overwritten data can be recovered.)
>>
>> Can I ask you what your evidence for that claim is?
> 
> This has been known for years; do some simple research (I'm not going to 
> do it for you, so think of it as homework).

Thanks for these kind words. I am asking because the reference that most 
people remember when they say something like this is Peter Gutmann's 
paper "Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory", 
from Usenix Security 1996. That paper has acquired various epilogues 
over time, the first reading, in part:

"[W]ith 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."

So my question, perhaps more fully stated, is: would you like to dispute 
this claim, and if so, what evidence do you have for disputing it?

Fun

Stephan