Security News > 2020 > February > NIST tests methods of recovering data from smashed smartphones
The forensic engineers who help police gather evidence understand this even if it's not always been clear which methods are the most effective as extracting data accurately enough for it to meet standards of evidence.
To examine the issue, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology says it recently conducted tests using 10 popular Android smartphones careful loaded with a mix of data accumulated during simulated use.
Engineers from NIST and its forensic partners then attempted to extract the data from the internal chips using different methods to compare with the original data set.
The comparison showed that both JTAG and chip-off extracted the data without altering it, but that some of the software tools were better at interpreting the data than others, especially for data from social media apps.
Neither technique is easy, especially extracting data using JTAG, and that's before factoring the shortage of trained forensics people and the subtle differences between different data extraction software and the diversity of smartphones.