FORENSIC CHIP OFF ACQUISITION OF NOR FLASH MEMORY IN EMBEDDED DEVICES
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Abstract
In digital forensics, the most important element is data. It can be any information such as images, documents, log files, and user credentials stored in a device. As our world moves forward, the digital devices are also advancing with technological developments, evolving from early computing systems such as ENIAC to modern flash-memory-based storage, whereas the data has become more fragile and prone to attackers. This review examines the application of Chip-off Acquisition on NOR Flash Memory in embedded devices. To prevent data recovery, digital devices are encrypted, physically damaged, or broken. Recovering data from these devices is a difficult aspect, as many challenges occur during the process. Traditional methods such as live acquisition, logical acquisition, and JTAG extraction have several limitations such as altering volatile data, requiring an active debug port etc. To overcome this issue Chip-off Acquisition is used. It is a hardware level data extraction technique involving removal of the chip, cleaning it, reading the raw data using a chip reader and processing the extracted raw data into the specialized software. Data from NAND Flash memory has been recovered by performing the acquisition, which has been studied. Chip-off Acquisition is also applicable to NOR Flash Memory. However, research specifically on NOR flash memory on various devices remains limited.
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