Now in this lecture I'm gonna show you how to securely format and wipe a US b device and encrypted so
everything stored on that USP device will be unreadable unless you know the passphrase used for the
encryption.
And to do this again tells comes with pre installed tools that allow us to do this.
All we need to do is go to applications utilities and we're going to go to the Disk Utility right here
now this utility can be used to format and encrypt any storage device connected to your computer right
now.
So as you can see right here it's listing all of the storage media that I have connected to this computer.
And as you can see even if we look here on my file manager you can see that I have an eight gigabyte
volume.
This is another USP device not the one that I'm using to boot tails.
And let's assume that I want to securely wipe everything that is in here.
To do that we're going to go and select it from here.
From the left and in here you can obviously it.
You can delete the selected partition or you can click on the COGS here to get more options.
And what I want to do right now is for multi partition.
And when you click on format you'll see the first option is the erase option.
So this is said to don't overwrite the existing data which will be quick but it's not secure because
like I said it'll only mark the locations for available for writing.
But the data will still be available and it'll be easily recoverable.
Therefore if you want a security wipe your device the selected device in here you want to click on this
and set it to overwrite existing data with zeros.
This will be slow as you can see but it will overwrite everything with random data which will make your
previous data that you stored on it harder to recover.
The next option in this window is the file system type that will be used on the storage device.
Now usually see this in any operating system.
When you try to format a storage device you can set it to whatever type you want as long as this type
is compatible with the operating system that you're going to use it on.
You can use part or NTFS for Windows XP for or for Linux then set the name of the storage media and
click on format to formatted now this whole application can also be used to encrypt your storage media
after formatting it so that whenever you stored data in it.
Everything that you store will be encrypted and nobody will be able to read it unless they know the
passphrase used to encrypted.
So it's similar to the way the persistent storage is configured on tables because as you remember when
we set it up to use persistence I said that this will be an encrypted storage and we set passphrase
that we need to use in order to unlock the persistence part.
So this is very similar in here.
You can use this program to encrypt a whole USB device and to do this you just need to click here on
the tape and set it to encrypted compatible with Linux systems which will use Luke's encryption.
Now when you click this as you can see again you'll have to fill up the name.
So let's say encrypted drive.
And then we'll have two new input boxes asking us for the passphrase that will be used to encrypt the
storage device so you can pick any strong passphrase you want click on format it's going to ask us to
confirm that we're formatting the right drive because keep in mind this will remove everything that
is stored on this device.
It will securely remove that actually to make it very difficult to recover.
And it's going to encrypted so that whatever we store on that device will be unreadable unless the right
passphrase is used.
Now I'm gonna say yes I want to do this I'm going to click on format give it its time because like we
said this will not just remove the files it'll overwrite everything that's there on the device with
random data and then remove this random data to make sure that our previously stored data is very hard
to recover once it does all of this it will also encrypt the storage so that everything we have on it
is unreadable without the passphrase.
Now once done you'll see the loading circular icon is gone from here.
So that means that the device has been securely wiped and encrypted.
So what I'm going to do right now is I'll close this and I'm actually going to disconnected from this
computer just to show you what happens when you go ahead and connected to a computer.
So I'm going to physically remove it now from my tells computer and I'm going to connect it again.
And as you can see it appears in here again on the left scene.
It's an encrypted device.
And if I click on it you'll see that I can't open it.
I can't see its content because we encrypted this device.
And like I said it's not going to be accessible unless we know the passphrase in order to decrypt it
and see its content.
So I'm gonna put the passphrase that I set when I encrypted the device I'm going to click on unlock
to unlock it.
And only now as you can see the lock is gone and it opened the device for me.
Now obviously it's empty because we just wiped it and we security wiped it.
So the data that previously was stored on it should be very difficult to recover.
And now if I put any data on this and disconnect the device even if someone manages to get their hands
on the device and read the content of it the contents will be gibberish because everything is encrypted
and it's not readable unless they know the passphrase.