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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

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.

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

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

To erase a SSD device, Devotio executes:

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

To erase a LUKS device, Devotio executes:

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

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

To erase a zram device, Devotio executes:

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

To erase a swap device, Devotio executes:

  • Turning off swap device
  • Writing all zeroes

To erase RAM, Devotio executes:

  • Cache drop

All data on volatile memories will be deleted at reboot.