[HacktionLab] wiping phones data

[mickfuzz]

On 21/11/2023 22:00, sb wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Long time lurker here, hi. The question is how deep do you want to go?
>
Not too deep if I'm honest. The main thing is this. I would like to be 
able to say to people that donate their phones for reuse something like.

"We wipe the user data from the phone in a way which makes it 
impractical for the next user to read it."

So not impossible / military grade no fragments etc. But in practical 
terms it's not going to happen with any off the shelf tools.

In all likelihood a factory reset would be adequate, but I would like to 
go further and prevent people from using a tool like dd rescue (gui) to 
recover files for phones before they were encrypted by default.

So some kind of tool to write zeros, overwrite old data seems like a 
good idea. Any suggestions welcome for android pre-10

So I do want to avoid having to install a new OS as that'll probably be 
overkill for this project I would hope.

Thanks everyone for their help so far.

On 22/11/2023 14:09, Michael Rogers wrote:
> On 21/11/2023 22:00, sb wrote:
>> When doing a factory reset, there is actually a duplicate hidden 
>> partition of the main one, that just gets reloaded onto the main one 
>> if it goes down. When you flash the bootloader with another manager, 
>> that's how you get access. Hope that makes sense. I have no idea 
>> about iPhone s.
>
> I think this is only the system partition though, not the user 
> partition where all your personal data's stored. A factory reset 
> should wipe the user partition but not either of the system partitions.
>
That was the impression that I got too. This would be good to confirm 
one way or other.

nice one
Mick
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