=SHRED
Disk shredding utility and other uses for RC4-random numbers

For when "dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdb bs=4M" is too slow to shred your disks
with...

I get about 17Mb/s on a core 2 quad 2.6GHz doing "dd if=/dev/urandom
of=/dev/null bs=4M", which sucks, so I wrote this.

The RC4 cipher is used and the state is periodically re-initalized with a few
bytes from /dev/urandom.  This can generate a stream of about 305Mb/s on the
aforementioned processor writing to /dev/null.  That is more than sufficient to
saturate a spinning disk (17Mb/s is sadly not).  One of these per disk and
shredding is done quite quickly.

This is not for the truly paranoid, because the RC4 cipher is not exactly
perfect, but the periodic reinitalization should be good enough.


RC4FILTER -- very simple, insecure, stream-cipher based encryption program
             for files and streams.