NerveGas details sure-fire method to wipe personal data from iPhones

With the iPhone 3G slated for arrival early next month, I’d imagine that many of you early iPhone-adopters are getting ready to hock that year-old iPhone of yours in preparation for the next-generation iPhone. I’m planning on selling my iPhone on the secondary market (ie. Craigslist, eBay) to help subsidize the already low price of $299 for the 16GB iPhone 3G variant.

But, I wouldn’t want all my personal and business emails and contacts falling in to the wrong hands. And, seeing as how a simple “iPhone Restore” doesn’t completely wipe the data from memory – it just erases the data’s file-system references (a “Quick Format” if you will) – I’m going to have to resort to more drastic measures.

So, what’s a potential iPhone-reseller to do? Well, thanks to the dev-work of famed iPhone-developer Jonathan Zdziarski, we all have a new command-line method to fully and completely wipe all iPhone data prior to resale.

The problem is that all this sensitive data is stored in a separate memory partition within the iPhone. And, there hasn’t really been an effective way to wipe this information completely, until now.

Zdziarski’s iPhone data-wipe method requires some command-line magic and a good hour’s worth of your time, but if data-security is important to you, an hour is a small price to pay to make sure malicious snoops don’t take your data do whatever nasty things it is they do.

There’s also a bootable RAM disk utility that uses Zdziarski’s data-wipe method. You can find it here (instructions included).

Head over to Zdziarski’s webpage to get all the juicy details on wiping your iPhone clean.

Zdziarski