Secure State Deletion: Testing the efficacy and integrity of secure deletion tools onSolid State Drives

The research aimed to determine the efficacy and integrity of several hard-drive disk deletion tools on solid state drives (SSDs). SSDs contain new technologies such as wear-levelling and device under provisioning to provide efficient functionality and speed for data management, but the same technologies may also provide obstacles to ensuring that all information is fully removed from the drive. Furthermore SSDs stores files in 4KB pages, yet data can only be deleted in 512KB blocks. This function uses the disk controller to remove all the pages from the block a file is being deleted from, storing the pages in a disk controlled cache. Once the whole block has been reset, the valid data is retrieved from the cache and replaced on an available block. The reset block is added to the SSDs free space. The specific purpose of this paper was to discover if any data was recovered, especially from the disk controlled cache while testing various tools and methods for their effectiveness of securely wiping data off SSDs. All tools except the GNU core utility DD left some file information which was recovered, though none of the recovered files was loadable. Additionally, the paper introduces the concept of the TRIM functionality and provides a baseline further research into this feature. Finally, a comparison of methods for securely deleting Solid State Drives is provided

State of The Art and Hot Aspects in Cloud Data Storage Security

Along with the evolution of cloud computing and cloud storage towards matu- rity, researchers have analyzed an increasing range of cloud computing security aspects, data security being an important topic in this area. In this paper, we examine the state of the art in cloud storage security through an overview of selected peer reviewed publications. We address the question of defining cloud storage security and its different aspects, as well as enumerate the main vec- tors of attack on cloud storage. The reviewed papers present techniques for key management and controlled disclosure of encrypted data in cloud storage, while novel ideas regarding secure operations on encrypted data and methods for pro- tection of data in fully virtualized environments provide a glimpse of the toolbox available for securing cloud storage. Finally, new challenges such as emergent government regulation call for solutions to problems that did not receive enough attention in earlier stages of cloud computing, such as for example geographical location of data. The methods presented in the papers selected for this review represent only a small fraction of the wide research effort within cloud storage security. Nevertheless, they serve as an indication of the diversity of problems that are being addressed

A Forensic Analysis And Comparison Of Solid State Drive Data Retention With Trim Enabled File Systems

Solid State Drives offer significant advantages over traditional hard disk drives. No moving parts, superior resistance to shock, reduced heat generation and increased battery life for laptops. However, they are susceptible to cell failure within the chips. To counter this, wear levelling is used so that cells are utilised for data at approximately the same rate. An improvement to the original wear levelling routine is TRIM, which further enhances the lifetime of the cells by allowing the garbage collection process as one operation rather than an on going process. The advantages of TRIM for the user is that it increases efficiency of the drive’s wear levelling algorithms, meaning quicker access times and longer lifetimes. The basic wear levelling routines have caused significant difficulties for forensic investigators as data is moved to different random locations without user input. Whilst this problem has been examined in past research, the implementation of TRIM has not had much attention. This research examines SSD drives across three TRIM enabled file systems, Windows, Linux and MAC OS X operating systems. The results show that TRIM leaves far less data for forensic investigators than drives without TRIM enabled

Forensic Research on Solid State Drives using Trim Analysis

There has been a tremendous change in the way we store data for the past decade. Hard Disk Drives, which were one of the major sources of storing data, are being replaced with Solid State Drives considering the higher efficiency and portability. Digital forensics has been very successful in recovering data from Hard Disk Drives in the past couple of years and has been very well established with Hard Disk Drives. The evolution of Solid State Drives over Hard Drive Drives is posing a lot of challenges to digital forensics as there are many crucial factors to be considering the architecture and the way data is stored in Solid State Drives. This paper gives a very detailed picture of the evolution of Solid State Drives over Hard Disk Drives. We understand the differences in their architecture and the ways to extract data from them. We further discuss in detail the various challenges Solid State Drives pose to the field of digital forensics, and we try to answer contradictory beliefs those are 1) Would data be permanently deleted in a Solid State Drives destroying the forensic evidence required to solve a case? 2) Can data be restored in a Solid State Drives by using proper techniques and still can be used as evidence in digital forensics? In this paper, we talk about the introduction of concepts such as the TRIM Command and Garbage collection, their importance, and we set up an experimental scenario where we implement the TRIM command and try extracting data from different types of Solid State Drives. We compare and evaluate the results obtained through the experiment and try to analyze the uses of the TRIM command and its performance over various Solid State Drives. The paper also discusses future work to make the role of Solid State Drives more efficient in digital forensics

The effectiveness of investigative tools for Secure Digital (SD) Memory Card forensics

There are many freeware based tools that can be downloadedfrom the World Wide Web. This paper reports the retrieval results of using these tools on digital images which have been deletedfrom Secure Digital (SD) carde. Since SD carde and USE flash drives are considered solid state technology, the tools selected are specifically for solid state drives. This research helps classify the selection of the most eifoctivefreeware tools that could be used to recover lost or deleted images, Further, it includes some of the issues that wouldfaceforensic examiners undertaking such investigations. The tools were tested using the Windows environment and did not require any specific forensics background in order to retrieve the images. The testing procedures included retrieval time and the state of the deleted image, viewable or damaged (corrupt). A review of tool functionality is given together with the most effective tools useful in retrieving images from deleted Secure Digital cards