SSD Forensic: Evidence Generation And Forensic Research On Solid State Drives Using Trim Analysis

TL;DR

This paper investigates how wear leveling and garbage collection in SSDs affect forensic evidence recovery, highlighting the challenges and variables influencing data persistence and recovery in solid-state storage devices.

Contribution

The study provides extensive experimental analysis on the impact of wear leveling and garbage collection on forensic data recovery across different SSD manufacturers.

Findings

Wear leveling can obscure digital evidence in SSDs.

Data persistence depends on manufacturer, file type, and time since deletion.

Conventional assumptions about storage media behavior are no longer valid.

Abstract

Traditional hard drives consisting of spinning magnetic media platters are becoming things of the past as with the emergence of the latest digital technologies and electronic equipment, the demand for faster, lighter, and more reliable alternate storage solutions is imperative. To attain these requirements, flash storage technologies like Solid State Drive (SSD) has overtaken traditional hard disk drives. In a forensic analysis of flash storage devices, forensic investigators are facing severe challenges for the reason that the sovereign behavior of solid-state storage media does not look favorable compared to traditional storage media devices. Wear Leveling, a fundamental mechanism in Solid State Drive (SSD), plays a severe challenge that most often destroys forensic evidence in many cases. It makes it complicated for forensic investigators to recover the necessary evidence. Persistence of deleted data in flash storage media depends on various factors like the Garbage Collection process, TRIM command, flash media type, manufacturer, capacity, file system, type of file saved, and the Operating System, etc. In view of this, extensive experiments conducted to identify the probability of data recovery and carving. Analyzed effects of Wear Leveling and Garbage Collection processes in Solid State Drive (SSD) of different manufacturers, having the same storage capacities and with a different type of files utilized. In conclusion, experimental findings established the fact that Wear Leveling in solid-state media can obfuscate digital evidence, and a conventional assumption regarding the behavior of storage media is no more valid. Moreover, data persistency also depends on the manufacturers, time-lapse of forensic analysis after data deletion, type of files, and size of files stored in Solid State Drives (SSD).