Secure file delete

Jim Sims sims at ezpzapps.com
Sat Jun 12 10:56:31 EDT 2010


On Jun 12, 2010, at 4:29 PM, Bill Vlahos wrote:

> I remember reading a suggestion on the list about creating a file with dummy information to overwrite an existing file. This way the original file will be zeroed out so there is nothing to undelete.
> 
> Unfortunately I can't find the email and was hoping that someone could clarify how to do this.
> 
> The reason for this is the next version of InfoWallet will support encrypted and password protected attachments but for someone to view an attachment it will have to be saved to disk unprotected and then launched. I want to securely delete the temporarily saved unprotected file.


Might have been me.

My client wanted me to take steps to keep people from saving small video files that were used by the app, make it very difficult for users to play them outside the app.

I placed all the videos into user properties - then to view the video, a temp file was made and that file used the data from the user property to make the video - after playing the video I would delete the file. 

I noticed that on rare occasions the file would appear in the trash on a reboot, inside a folder (perhaps the folder was named "saved" or "rescued" items?).

So, I changed my script so that before I deleted the file I would write over the file with a simple single phrase, thus destroying the video and changing it to a simple text file. 


sims








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