Validation of Secure Wiping Applications for Android Phones

Identity theft and financial fraud are happening very frequently, and data privacy becomes one of the biggest challenges for Android phone users. Cyber thefts are particularly perceptive when recovering confidential information from user phones after users have deleted/erased their data from phone memory using the factory restore or by using data wiping applications available on Google Play Store and Internet. This research work proposed and developed an efficient data wiping application for Android phones according to the National Institute of Standard and Technology (NIST) SP800-88 Standard of USA. The proposed application is based on the data overwrite technique. It has two layers, data erasing and data overwriting. After erasing the user data from phone memory, it overwrites deleted data locations by three overwrite phases, zeros, ones, and random characters. The data overwrite layer makes deleted data permanently unrecoverable from phone memory.To validate existing wiping applications, we selected the following data wiping applications from Google Play Store: Secure Erase with iShredder-6, Secure Delete, and Shreddit-Data Eraser for data wiping experiments and picked the following data recovery applications and software to validate the above-selected wiping applications: DiskDigger, Dr Fone, FonePaw and EaseUS MobiSaver for data recovery experiments on following selected Android phones: Samsung Galaxy SM-J600F, Vivo 1908 and Huawei Honor 9-lite LLD-21 having Android version Oreo 8.0 and 8.1. The experiments result show that the chosen wiping applications are not working according to the standard, and the erased data is recoverable through the above-mentioned data recovery applications and software. On the other hand, data could not be recovered from the phones which are wiped with the proposed framework. We maintained the record of the recovered data from wiped Android phones and proposed an efficient overwrite-based data wiping application for Android phones based on the experiment results. Recommendation: A preinstall secure data wiping application must meet standards such as NIST SP800-88 for complete data erasure and should be available on all android phones for users.