Secure Data Deletion Framework for Android (NOUGAT)

Abstract

With the increased usage of smart phones over the years, an immense evolution in camera technology and image enhancement applications has been observed. However, this associates greater security concerns with smart phones. Cyber crime offenders often retrieve personal images from second hand smart phones and try to black mail or harass their former users. Similar situations are often faced by users in undesirable situations like hacking or theft of smart phones. Despite being deleted, sensitive images are recovered by cyber crime offenders using forensic methods. This thesis presents a comprehensive and comparative analysis of performance of five famous image deletion applications for Android (Nougat) against NIST 800-88 standard [1]. Comparative Analysis has been performed with the help of forensic tools which are Autopsy [2],DiskDigger [3], and XRY [4] and based on the results concluded, a framework for secure image deletion has been proposed and validated to ensure permanent deletion of images.