Dakons blog

Today KGpg lost one of it's features. With r728051 I kicked the shredder out of the game. Since this might have been a features some people used I think it's a good idea to explain why I did this.

Shredding is not a feature that is related in any way to GPG. Shredding uses a special call into kdelibs that does the actual work. Using this call was always a bit risky. Shredding done by a user can only overwrite that parts of a file the user has directly under it's control. Since everyone uses a journalling file systems these days the data might be not only be where it belongs but also somewhere in the journal. When you shred the file whatever is in your journal is beyond your control. To securely delete this data you need superuser permissions and some deeper knowledge of your filesystem.

Now kdelibs does not have the shredding call anymore. When we want to keep the feature we have to reimplement it at all from the beginning. Since KGpg is not a filesystem tool but a GPG interface there is no real reason to keep it. When we would decide to keep it we need to have a look on the security of this call. As I explained shredding is hard to do without deep filesystem knowledge and so it's unlikely to do it right for all filesystems. The worst thing we can do is telling the user we do something secure and afterwards doing crap. Faking security I want not be associated with, this is something that should be left to Personal Firewalls. That's it, that's why the shredder is gone. Cowabunga!