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Open Access Knowledge and Scholarship

Date of Award

12-2017

Culminating Project Type

Starred Paper

Degree Name

Information Assurance: M.S.

Department

Information Assurance and Information Systems

College

Herberger School of Business

First Advisor

Mark B. Schmidt

Second Advisor

Dien D. Phan

Third Advisor

Balsy Kasi

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Abstract

There has been a tremendous increase in the usage of electronic devices day by day. With the increase in usage of electronic devices, technology keeps on emerging. Due to the emergence of new technologies, there has always been a scope for the hackers to cash the loopholes that are available which resulted in a hefty increase in cyber crimes. Consequently, the number of investigations that require digital forensic expertise have been resulting in a huge evidence backlogs that are being encountered by the law enforcement agencies all over the world. It is anticipated that the number of cases that would require digital forensics is likely to be increased in future.

The primary storage technology used for digital information has remained constant over the last two decades in the form of the magnetic disc. For decades, Hard drives have been dominating the market due to their cost and capacity. However, things are being developed and manufactured to be faster and smaller but there are few changes that truly turned to be technological revolutionary. Solid states drive familiarly known as SSD have crept up on us as they arrive under cover of the previously known technology. This paper demonstrated that the assumptions about the behavior of a storage media are no longer valid, how modern storage devices will operate under their own volition without any computer instructions. These operations are highly destructive of traditionally recoverable data. This would contaminate evidence, can make validation of digital evidence reports difficult, it can complicate the process of live and dead analysis recovery and can also complicate and frustrate the post recovery forensic analysis. This paper compared the key evidence that were identified in an HDD and SSD and discussed the key features that make SSD self-Destructive and cause difficulties for Forensic Investigations.

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