Investigating Information recovered from Re-sold Mobile Devices

The data storage capacity mobile digital devices is continually increasing, with a corresponding potential for such devices to retain sensitive personal and corporate information. Simultaneously, the increasing complexity of mobile devices makes the management of such data increasingly challenging for both users wishing to preserve confidentiality and forensic investigators attempting to establish reliable evidence. This extended abstract describes the experimental design of an on-going investigation of the data contents of re-sold mobile devices. The consistency of results across different mobile forensic investigations is also investigated. The purpose of the experiment was to (a) estimate the amount and type of sensitive information retained on re-sold mobile devices and (b) the consistency of data recovery by standard commercial forensic applications.