Solid State Drive (SSD) Forensics

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
Bibtex

Author : 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
Bibtex

Author : 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
Bibtex

Author : 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
Bibtex

Author : 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
Bibtex

Author : 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