Solid State Drive (SSD) Forensics
From Forensics Wiki
Solid State Drives pose a variety of interesting challenges for computer forensics. Most SSD devices are based on flash memory. Flash has two properties that complicate its use in computer storage systems:
- Unlike normal hard drives that can be written in a single pass, flash memory is arranged in pages that must first be erased before it can be written.
- Each flash page consists of multiple blocks. Typically block size is 512 bytes and page size is 2KiB, 4KiB, or larger.
- Each page can be erased and rewritten a limited number of times---typically 1000 to 10,000. (Hard drive sectors, in contrast, can be rewritten millions of times or more.)
To overcome these problems, SSD manufacturers have created a system for wear leveling---that is, spreading the writes to flash out among different sectors. Wear leveling is typically done with a flash translation layer that maps logical sectors (or LBAs) to physical pages. Most FTLs are contained within the SSD device and are not accessible to end users.
Bibliography
Michael Wei, Laura M. Grupp, Frederick M. Spada, Steven Swanson - Reliably Erasing Data from Flash-Based Solid State Drives
- FAST 2011 ,2011
- http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/users/m3wei/assets/pdf/FMS-2010-Secure-Erase.pdf
BibtexAuthor : Michael Wei, Laura M. Grupp, Frederick M. Spada, Steven Swanson
Title : Reliably Erasing Data from Flash-Based Solid State Drives
In : FAST 2011 -
Address :
Date : 2011
Graeme B. Bell, Richard Boddington - Solid State Drives: The Beginning of the End for Current Practice in Digital Forensic Recovery?
- Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law 5,2011
- http://www.jdfsl.org/subscriptions/JDFSL-V5N3-Bell.pdf
BibtexAuthor : Graeme B. Bell, Richard Boddington
Title : Solid State Drives: The Beginning of the End for Current Practice in Digital Forensic Recovery?
In : Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law -
Address :
Date : 2011
Billard, David, Hauri, Rolf - Making sense of unstructured flash-memory dumps
- Proceedings of the 2010 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing pp. 1579--1583, New York, NY, USA,2010
- http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1774088.1774426
BibtexAuthor : Billard, David, Hauri, Rolf
Title : Making sense of unstructured flash-memory dumps
In : Proceedings of the 2010 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing -
Address : New York, NY, USA
Date : 2010
James E. Regan - The Forensic Potential of Flash Memory
- Master's Thesis, Naval Postgraduate School , Monterey, CA,2009
- http://handle.dtic.mil/100.2/ADA509258
BibtexAuthor : James E. Regan
Title : The Forensic Potential of Flash Memory
In : Master's Thesis, Naval Postgraduate School -
Address : Monterey, CA
Date : 2009
Phillips, B. J., Schmidt, C. D., Kelly, D. R. - Recovering data from USB flash memory sticks that have been damaged or electronically erased
- Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Forensic applications and techniques in telecommunications, information, and multimedia and workshop pp. 19:1--19:6, ICST, Brussels, Belgium, Belgium,2008
- http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1363217.1363243
BibtexAuthor : Phillips, B. J., Schmidt, C. D., Kelly, D. R.
Title : Recovering data from USB flash memory sticks that have been damaged or electronically erased
In : Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Forensic applications and techniques in telecommunications, information, and multimedia and workshop -
Address : ICST, Brussels, Belgium, Belgium
Date : 2008
Presentations
- ATA Trim / Delete Notification Support in Windows 7, Neal Christiansen, Storage Developer 2009
- Challenges of SSD Forensic Analysis, Digital Assembly, http://www.slideshare.net/digitalassembly/challenges-of-ssd-forensic-analysis
- [1]Solid State Drives: Ruining Forensics, by Scott Moulton, DEFCON 16 (2008)
- Scott Moulton, Shmoocon 20008, SSD drives vs. Hard Drives.
- Risky Business #185, Peter Gutmann talks SSD forensics, March 4, 2011 (Radio Show)
