STUDY ON NEED OF DATA SANITIZATION AND SANITIZATION TECHNIQUES FOR MEMORY DEVICES

Abstract

The fright for security and privacy has increased significantly with the new updates which have occurred in the
practice of network, electronic devices such as PDA, storage, digital I/O and Smart Cell Phones. With the passage of time,
a device can have a large volume of stored data for a single user which may be of no use also. In addition to this, internet
files, cache, cookies, images, video & audio files etc. may overriding the large space in memory of devices. So when a user
or an organization changes or upgrades existing device, there is great need to delete existing data permanently. Criminals
also delete files to destroy evidences. Deleting the old files, folders from the disk or from recycle bin or by disk formatting
is not a guaranteed way to remove any data or file from the digital device. Data can be recovered with freely available
large number of software. This imposes great threat to privacy of innocent user and the same time provides help to
forensic investigators. Sanitization of a device means before changing or upgrading any storage media, absolutely
removing complete data from it. Data can’t be recovered with any data recovery software from sanitized device. However
data sanitization is also considered as one of the method of anti-forensic. A study on need of sanitization of different
memory or storage devices and the options which are applicable for sanitization has been carried out. The paper
highlights various methods, tools and techniques, for hard drives and flash drives, for removing residual data and
sanitizing them.