Anybody knows of a good android app to do secure file shredding? (1 Viewer)

[e9999]

What I want to do is being able to erase safely specific files with confidential info so that they are not recoverable by somebody who would get ahold of my devices.
Apparently, Android has a system that is quite different from Windows and it takes a different approach to do that.

I was surprised to see that there is relatively little out there and all the apps I have seen are criticizing for leaving behind recoverable files as in they are "not safe" and "don't work".
Odd.

So anybody knows of an app that does actually work for sure?

 

[terrx]

I use the secure messaging app Wickr and it has a secure shredder built in. Look under the settings menu. The app is free and available for both ios and android.

 

[Fast Eddy]

It's fairly trivial to do. I'd be surprised if there aren't a bunch of them floating around. You just have to open the file, write it to all zeroes, close it, then delete it.

If you're really paranoid, you'd want to shut the device off with the battery out for a few minutes to make sure the RAM is cleared too.

 

[terrx]

Trivial I suppose depending on what you want. Magnetic/rotational media needs to be overwritten many times to become unrecoverable. Perhaps flash is different. Second, in some cases the fact that you deleted and shredded a file would get you in trouble. For that all signs that a file existed in the first place also need to be removed. Third if you've already deleted a file or for example deleted web cache and history you don't have access to the original file to open zero and delete, so the shredder needs to clear the free storage space (I believe this is what wickr does). I imagine other parts of the file system like swap space would also need to be addressed for the truly obsessed. Again it depends on the goal and the level of security needed.