How to "format" an iPhone to clear your data completely

by Nilay Patel posted May 21st 2008 at 3:56PM

We briefly mentioned using junk data to overwrite the iPhone's flash as a last-ditch method of securely clearing off your user data yesterday, and although we were half-joking, that's pretty much your only option until Apple provides a proper secure erase feature. Security researcher Rich Mogull has helpfully laid out the steps for you, and they're pretty much what you'd expect: restore your iPhone, don't sync any personal data to it, and then manually transfer three different playlists large enough to fill the flash. Essentially you're doing a manual three-pass overwrite, which is pretty much exactly the long and tedious process it sounds like -- but we wouldn't dream of selling or giving away our iPhones (or any other phone with personal data on it) without struggling through it.

[Via Hack A Day]

Filed under: Handsets, Apple

Tags: how to, HowTo, security, user data, UserData

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

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Tor Slettnes @ May 21st 2008 4:03PM

This kindof begs the question as to why you would leave unsecured data on a mobile device in the first place! Suppose you lost it?

I do keep lots of personal info (credit card numbers, insurance policy numbers, passport numbers etc) on my Nokia N95 - but stored in an encrypted and password-protected format (using BestSafe from smartphoneware.com; other alternatives are HandySafe from epocware.com, PhoneWallet from symbianguru.com, and splashid from splashware.com).

I seem to have been reading about something similar being made available for the iPhone through the new SDK...

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