Hello! Well as the title says I am looking for software capable of wiping the contents of a smartphone. I’m going to sell two old phones, a Samsung Galaxy S5 and an iPhone 5S. Problem is the software i’ve come across is always behind a paywall. So do you know of any good free software to wipe phones?
Factory reset is not good enough, as people with even limited skills and software could grab old private data. Looking for software to get rid of photos, messages and so forth.
-You can hit the nand flash with a hammer…
-Or you can slow format the entire rom space from recovery (must have a recovery like TWRP or ClockworkMod)
-Pretty sure you can slow format using ADB (but I’ve never done that before)
Well a factory reset pretty much just wipes cache and data, still recoverable if it hasn’t been overwritten during re-intialization. But I will say you have to be fucking smart to recover it, maybe you’ll be fine?
Would it perhaps be possible to stuff it with a big enough file, delete it and then rinse and repeat a couple of times? So the older data gets overwritten?
Yep, big enough to take up the entire free space of the phone (just to be sure).
Also that is how HDDs get wiped clean (overwriiten many times until there is no trace of previous magnetic signature, you only need to overwrite once with flash storage).
adb shell am broadcast -a android.intent.action.MASTER_CLEAR
or to run it as root you can adb shell “su -c ‘am broadcast -a android.intent.action.MASTER_CLEAR’”
Edit: Thought of another route. dd works in adb shell, so there’s no reason you can’t dd if=/dev/zero of=/DEVICEto wipe over it. You’ll want to cat /proc/partitions to identify which device to wipe out.
At risk of going off topic, if you’re this paranoid, chances are good that total destruction of the physical device is the only thing that’s truly secure. If you’re this paranoid, chances are good that anything you want deleted is worth destroying the device as well.