Forensic Aspects of Various Flash Memory Devices

Flash memory devices provide high storage volume with low power consumption and faster read-write operations when compared to HDD. This makes FLASH memory devices to be considered as an efficient storage unit thus bringing huge demand for the usage of FLASH memory devices. One of the major problems faced by forensic investigators is extracting deleted data from flash memory devices, as some of the flash memory devices prevent extraction of deleted data using the standard forensic techniques. This paper focuses on exploring forensic opportunities for various flash-based memory devices. This is done by a thorough study of physics of flash memory, the development of flash transition layers, and the file systems that support these devices. It then conducts forensic experiments on various types of flash-based storage media and summarizes the results of each media. This paper also tries to explore various practices to be applied on flash storage media thus enabling them to retrieve deleted information with the use of standard forensic techniques