Effectiveness of privacy tools versus forensic tools

Abstract

Today, with the current technology advances we have, people are increasingly more connected to the Internet, whereby privacy of data has increasing become a concern among people. Such as credit card information theft or confidential data in the computer which cannot be disclosed to the “anybody”. Although there are many varieties of Privacy Tools online which can help attempt to remove these confidential data away from the hard disk, the privacy of the users could still be compromised in some ways. As a result, this project has conducted several experiments and investigation on the effectiveness of various Open-Source Privacy Tools found online, which protects the privacy of the users by wiping the disk sectors with random bits of data or bits of 0s and removing entries from the Master File Table which ensures that all these unwanted data cannot be recovered by any ‘attackers’ who wished to get a hold of the confidential data.

In this project, various experiments and investigations were performed on the Window Utility provided by Windows and 3 Open-Source Privacy Tools against 5 Open-Source Forensic Tools to study and evaluate the effectiveness of various wiping algorithms approach used by the Privacy Tools. There are 2 important factors which determine the effectiveness of the Privacy Tools, the file name entries in the Master File Table, and the content in the disk sector, as it can be easily be recovered by the Forensic Tools if these traces of digital was not cleared.

An implementation of Prototype Free Space Cleaner and Master File Table Reader have been integrated together to be used to protect the privacy of the users as well as discover the traces of digital trails left over in the disk sector.

However, due to ever-advancement and changing technology, newer and better Forensic Tools will be created to attempt to recover these data which are considered as ‘deleted’ forever. Therefore new investigations and experiments on new Privacy Tools should be conducted as technology advances.