Self-erasing flash drives destroy court evidence
2nd 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.