Australian Digital Forensics Conference
Document Type
Conference Proceeding
Publisher
School of Computer and Information Science, Edith Cowan University, Perth, Western Australia
Abstract
Current forensic tools for examination of embedded systems like mobile phones and PDAs mostly perform data extraction on a logical level and do not consider the type of storage media during data analysis. This report suggests different low level approaches for the forensic examination of flash memories and describes three lowlevel data acquisition methods for making full memory copies of flash memory devices. Results of a file system study in which USB memory sticks from 45 different make and models were used are presented. For different mobile phones, this paper shows how full memory copies of their flash memories can be made and which steps are needed to translate the extracted data into a format that can be understood by common forensic media analysis tools. Artefacts, caused by flash specific operations like block erasing and wear levelling, are discussed and directions are given for enhanced data recovery and analysis of data originating from flash memory.
DOI
10.4225/75/57b28b7240cd3
Comments
7th Australian Digital Forensics Conference, Edith Cowan University, Perth Western Australia, December 3rd 2009.