Smartphone wiping software

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?

Thanks.

When you say wipe do you mean back to factory or do you mean blank phone?

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)

Were the phones encrypted? If so a factory reset is as safe as it gets.

Havent done anything to the iPhone yet, but did a factory reset on the S5.

Yes, but was encryption enabled? Resetting an encrypted phone effectively destroys all data because it removes the encryption key.

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Unfortunatley it was not. Maybe i’m too paranoid but both phones have had pictures of my kid and nudes of my wife :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

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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?

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Moved to a more appropriate category. ( at least in my mind )

If the category that you had originally was more appropriate you can change it back.

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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).

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For android you can trigger a factory reset with

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.

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A factory reset doesn’t override the data.

and /dev/random or /dev/urandom if you are really paranoid

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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.

I will try this then, thank you everyone for all your help! :slight_smile:

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