title: Remote Wiping and Secure Deletion on Mobile Devices: A Review.
abstract: Mobile devices have become ubiquitous in almost every sector of both private and commercial endeavors. As a result of such widespread use in everyday life, many users knowingly and unknowingly save significant amounts of personal and/or commercial data on these mobile devices. Thus, loss of mobile devices through accident or theft can expose users-and their businesses-to significant personal and corporate cost. To mitigate this data leakage issue, remote wiping features have been introduced to modern mobile devices. Given the destructive nature of such a feature, however, it may be subject to criminal exploitation (e.g., a criminal exploiting one or more vulnerabilities to issue a remote wiping command to the victim's device). To obtain a better understanding of remote wiping, we survey the literature, focusing on existing approaches to secure flash storage deletion and provide a critical analysis and comparison of a variety of published research in this area. In support of our analysis, we further provide prototype experimental results for three Android devices, thus providing both a theoretical and applied focus to this article as well as providing directions for further research.
authors.affiliation: University of South Australia, GPO Box 2471, Adelaide, SA, 5001, Australia.
authors.forename: Ming Di
authors.initials: MD
authors.lastname: Leom
authors.affiliation: University of South Australia, GPO Box 2471, Adelaide, SA, 5001, Australia.|Department of Information Systems and Cyber Security, University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, 78249-0631, USA.
authors.forename: Kim-Kwang Raymond
authors.initials: KR
authors.lastname: Choo
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, University of Canterbury, Private Bag 4800, Christchurch, New Zealand.
authors.forename: Ray
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Hunt
keywords: NAND nonvolatile flash memory; Solid-state drive/disk; flash storage; forensic science; remote wiping; secure deletion