The efficient recovery of deleted data from NAND flash memory

NAND flash memory is used in flash drives, smart phones, and memory cards for digital cameras. While there are ways to recover data from deleted memory, there are no universal or efficient ways to recover data from NAND flash memory. When a user clicks “delete” on a file in this type of memory, the file is not necessarily deleted, but may just be hidden. This means these files are still on the chip, but are inaccessible through normal means. The ability to recover this lost data could help computer forensic examiners during investigations and corporations working to use secure deletion techniques of confidential files. This project will provide a potential solution to recovering data from NAND flash memory. This research is a continuation of previous research where some code was written in Python using processes. The previous attempt to write this software resulted in software that was slow and would not scale well to large storage devices. This research explores whether software can be rewritten to take advantage of parallel computer execution on multiple processor cores to run and finish execution in a reasonable amount of time that would scale well to larger chip sizes, creating an efficient means of analyzing deleted data from NAND flash memory