[v5, v6] Is a military erasure pattern better than others?

Overwriter

Active Member
If you spend any time studying encryption you will see the term military grade on a lot of products, the term is pointless. Mathematics and science rule in the digital world not the military. Peter Gutmann suggests that pre-determined patterns, such as "military approved" ones could actually be an attempt to fool opposing intelligence agencies or governments by publicly understating the necessary requirements for secure magnetic media sanitation.

To think of it another way, if an attacker knows exactly what pattern was used to overwrite data on a disk that pattern “mask” could be filtered out to reveal the original data, assuming this is technically possible which is unlikely. If random data was used there is no pre determined pattern with which to construct the mask in the first place.
 
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