Security News > 2011 > March > Self-erasing flash drives destroy court evidence

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/01/self_destructing_flash_drives/ By Dan Goodin in San Francisco The Register 1st March 2011 The inner workings of solid state storage devices are so fundamentally different from traditional hard drives that forensic investigators can no longer rely on current preservation techniques when admitting evidence stored on them in court cases, Australian scientists said in a research paper. Data stored on Flash drives is often subject to a process the scientists called "self-corrosion," in which evidence is permanently erased or contaminated in ways that bits stored on magnetic-based hard drives are not. The alterations happen in the absence of any instructions from the user. The findings introduce a "grey area" into the integrity of files that are forensically extracted from the devices and threaten to end a "golden age" of digital evidence gathering offered by older storage types. "Given the pace of development in SSD memory and controller technology, and the increasingly proliferation [sic] of manufacturers, drives, and firmware versions, it will probably never be possible to remove or narrow this new grey area within the forensic and legal domain," the scientists, from Australia's Murdoch University, wrote. "It seems possible that the golden age for forensic recovery and analysis of deleted data and deleted metadata may now be ending." For decades, investigators have worked with tape, floppy drives and hard drives that continue to store huge amounts of information even when the files they're contained in are marked for deletion. Even wiping the disks isn't always enough to permanently erase the contents. SSDs, by contrast, store data in blocks or pages of NAND-based transistor chips that must be electronically erased before they can be reused. [...] ___________________________________________________________ Tegatai Managed Colocation: Four Provider Blended Tier-1 Bandwidth, Fortinet Universal Threat Management, Natural Disaster Avoidance, Always-On Power Delivery Network, Cisco Switches, SAS 70 Type II Datacenter. Find peace of mind, Defend your Critical Infrastructure. http://www.tegataiphoenix.com/

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http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/01/self_destructing_flash_drives/