RE: [cygwin] DD bug fails to wipe last 48 sectors of a disk

["Jason Pyeron" <jpyeron@pdinc.us>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Hashim Aziz via Cygwin
> Sent: Monday, December 28, 2020 7:46 PM
> 
>> From: Cygwin <cygwin-bounces@cygwin.com> on behalf of Brian Inglis
>> <Brian.Inglis@SystematicSw.ab.ca>
>> Sent: 23 June 2020 8:33 PM
>> To: cygwin@cygwin.com <cygwin@cygwin.com>
>> Subject: Re: [cygwin] DD bug fails to wipe last 48 sectors of a disk
>> 
>> I don't have the facilities to test, and there appear to be *NO* Windows
>> documentation details on error condition handling, but my suspicion is that Unix
>> reads and writes fail only *AFTER* reading or writing at the end of the device,
>> but Windows reads and writes extents may be checked and failed *BEFORE* reading
>> or writing any data near the end of the device.
>> If the actual Windows error code returned is generic, Cygwin would need to
>> pre-check the device size as Windows does, and reduce read and write sizes to
>> the allowed maximum at the end of the device.
> 
> That's very helpful, thank you. Do you know if any more work has been done to attempt to
> fix this bug, and whether it's likely to be fixed anytime soon? It's crazy that such a
> commonly used command leaves so much data unwiped unbeknown to so many users, it's a very
> serious security hole and the sooner it can be fixed the better.

Have you tried iflag=fullblock ? This causes special handling.

> Sent: Monday, December 28, 2020 7:25 PM
> To: Jason Pyeron 
> 
> I didn't previously see this email, but the point is that this is a bug - dd should not 
> require first making calculations based on the size of each drive or using the smallest 
> possible block size (and hence taking a ridiculous amount of time) in order to do what 

Do you have any metrics that it is faster, by any meaningful amount? If so I would be very interested in mitigating it, but I suspect not the actual case.

> it's meant to do. It should always wipe the last sector of the drive regardless, just 
> as it does on other UNIX-like systems. This is why this behaviour is a bug that 
> needs to be fixed.

This does not appear to be a bug, but user error. Per the DD source "Some devices require alignment 
on a sector or page boundary"

DD has never "dealt with error handling" except when conversion were in play. When no conversions are in play it 

            {
              /* Write any partial block. */
              exit_status = EXIT_FAILURE;
              break;
            }

On windows the block devices require respecting block device boundaries, any change would be an upstream patch - not a Cygwin patch.

Sorry if this sounds rough.

Respectfully,

Jason Pyeron