GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 414235
Option to delete file after encryption
Last modified: 2020-06-06 08:52:14 UTC
It would be nice if there was the option to delete the file after it is encrypted. Even better it would be nice if there was the possibilty to securely wipe the file.
This should be possible and relatively easy to add to the UI, but not until after 2.18 is out due to freezes. The wiping could be possible, but after a cursory search I was unable to find a wipe utility that has had a recent release or update. If you could identify one that's maintained for us to call that would be great. If it's a cross platform wipe utility even better. Otherwise, this is something we might need to pull into our tree and I'm not sure that we have the expertise to maintain a secure wipe utility.
Wiping is not so easy as one would think. See the man page of the 'shred' for more information. Even if one could guarantee secure wiping on some filesystems this could be difficult or impossible to do on network shares where one doesn't have any insight on the file system used by the server.
OK, but it would be nice if there was the possibility to wipe on filesystems which support secure wiping (i.e. only local filesystems). The only wipe utility I know is 'wipe' (http://packages.debian.org/stable/utils/wipe). But it seems that the last release was in 2002.
*** Bug 420226 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 551235 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Why not put the cleartext version on a ramdisk and not let it touch the actual drive? Maybe in /tmp in a chmod 700 directory?
Or just use something like this: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/EncryptedPrivateDirectory to put your files in. I just checked and our nautilus plugin works with it.
>OK, but it would be nice if there was the possibility to wipe on filesystems >which support secure wiping (i.e. only local filesystems). That doesn't really seem feasible; without knowing the mechanics of the filesystem it isn't really possible to know if a file has been 'wiped' or not. Much better, if you are that concerned, to just use a filesystem that supports secure wipe. There is a secure-delete flag that can be applied to objects in ext3/4 using chattr. But I believe your kernel has to have a patch applied for it to work.
seahorse-plugins is not under active development anymore: https://gitlab.gnome.org/Infrastructure/Infrastructure/issues/257 It had its last code changes many years ago: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/seahorse-plugins/-/commits/master Closing this report as WONTFIX as part of Bugzilla Housekeeping to reflect reality. Please feel free to reopen this ticket (or rather transfer the project to GNOME Gitlab, as GNOME Bugzilla is deprecated) if anyone takes the responsibility for active development again.