Forensic analysis of image deletion applications

With the increased use of smartphones over the years, an immense evolution in camera technology and image enhancement applications has been observed. However, this associates significantly greater security concerns with smartphones. Cyber crime offenders often retrieve personal images from second hand smart phones and try to blackmail or harass their former users. Similar situations are often faced by users in undesirable situations like hacking or theft of smartphones. Despite deletion of images by popular image deletion tools, sensitive images can still be recovered by using widely available forensic methods and tools. This paper checks the efficacy of top five image deletion applications namely Shreddit, Android Eraser, Permanent Delete, Sdelete, and Safe Delete in perspective of permanent deletion of images for Android, against National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST), Standard for Media Sanitization known as NIST 800-88. The efficiency of the aforementioned deletion applications has been analyzed by using famous image recovery forensic tools; XRY, Autopsy, and DiskDigger. The results of our forensic analysis recovered the deleted images which were ostensibly deleted by the chosen applications. Moreover, all the image locations have been identified in this research which were found to contain images’ artifacts. In addition to that, the capability of forensic tools in recovering deleted images has been discussed too. So, this research highlights weaknesses of existing deletion mechanisms. Moreover, based on the conducted forensic analysis and NIST 800-88 standard, the research proposes a model for secure deletion by setting grounds for the development of a secure image deletion application to make permanent deletion of images possible.