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Athena OS

Devotio

Devotio is a secure disk erasure tool based on DoD 5220.22 M, ATA Secure Erase and encryption-based destruction.

It allows to select the specific device to erase or every disk on your system. It involves:

  • HDD
  • SSD
  • LUKS
  • USB
  • RAM
  • Zram
  • Swap

Usage

Devotio is included in Athena OS Live ISO. You can use Devotio to erase devices also on other operating systems.

You can burn it on a device and land on Athena OS Live Environment. Then, run:

Terminal window
sudo devotio

and choose secure erasing between a specific disk or all devices.

A test on a virtual machine HDD sized of 50 GB needed 19 minutes for secure erasing.

Specification

Devotio automatically recognizes the type of devices connected to your system and erases them properly.

HDD

To erase a HDD device, Devotio executes:

  • File system formatting
  • 3-pass overwriting
  • Writing all zeroes
  • Writing all ones
  • Writing all random data
  • multiple-pass overwriting
  • LUKS encryption
  • LUKS header destruction

SDD

To erase a SSD device, Devotio executes:

  • File system formatting
  • TRIM command issuing
  • ATA Secure Erase running
  • LUKS encryption
  • LUKS header destruction

LUKS

To erase a LUKS device, Devotio executes:

  • Writing all random data
  • 3-pass overwriting
  • LUKS encryption
  • LUKS header destruction

Flash Drive

To erase a Flash device, Devotio executes:

  • File system formatting
  • 3-pass overwriting
  • Writing all zeroes
  • Writing all ones
  • Writing all random data
  • LUKS encryption
  • LUKS header destruction

Zram

To erase a zram device, Devotio executes:

  • Turning off zram device
  • Writing all random data
  • zram device reset

Swap

To erase a swap device, Devotio executes:

  • Turning off swap device
  • Writing all zeroes

RAM

To erase RAM, Devotio executes:

  • Cache drop

All data on volatile memories will be deleted at reboot.