In this lecture, I'm going to show you how to securely format and wipe a USB device and encrypt it
so everything stored on that USB device will be unreadable unless you know the passphrase used for the
encryption.
And to do this again tells what 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 USB 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 unmount 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 format the partition.
And when you click on format, you'll see the first option is the erase option.
So this is set to don't overwrite the existing data, which will be quick, but it's not secure because
it will 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 to securely wipe your device, the selected device in here, you want to click
on this.
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, you 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 fat or NTFS for windows ext4 for Linux.
Then set the name of the storage media and click on format to format it.
Now, this whole application can also be used to encrypt your storage media after formatting it so that
whenever you store 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 encrypt it.
So it's similar to the way the persistence storage is configured on tales, because as you remember,
when we set it up to use persistence, I said that this will be an encrypted storage and we set a 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 type and set it to encrypted compatible with Linux systems, which will use Linux 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 to 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 encrypt
it so that whatever we store on that device will be unreadable unless the right passphrase is used.
Now, I'm going to 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 will 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 disconnect it from this
computer just to show you what happens when you go ahead and connect it to a computer.
So I'm going to physically remove it now from my Tales computer and I'm going to connect it again.
And as you can see, it appears in here again on the left saying 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 going to put the passphrase that I set when I encrypted the device.
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 securely 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.