New York Times: Sleuthing Software Can Reassemble Deleted Photos
The New York Times reports on an interesting piece of software:
Now, new software is smart enough to find and reassemble fragmented digital photographs, even when the directions for locating them have been deleted. The feat is similar to assembling a million pieces of a jigsaw puzzle with no guiding box-top image.
One day, this software may be useful not only in its consumer applications, restoring snapshots that have accidentally been erased, but also in recovering deliberately deleted images that might provide evidence in cases of corporate spying or child pornography.
The program was devised by the computer scientist Nasir Memon, a professor at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University in Brooklyn. It is an example of a sophisticated technique called file carving — restoring the contents of a file after the identifying information that accompanies it has been removed or lost — said Golden G. Richard III, a professor of computer science at the University of New Orleans, who has also written a file-carving application. [...]
In [Dr. Memon's] research, he discovered that latent images may be of concern not only to wrongdoers, but also to ordinary people who mistakenly think that have expunged snapshots from their camera cards before selling them. He learned this when he bought used camera cards on eBay to test the power of his software and recovered many highly personal images from them.
“People think they have deleted the images, he said, “but typically they have deleted only the table of contents” that tells where the images are stored, not the images themselves.
“You have to completely overwrite the images,” he advised. “People should be careful when they sell their computers or flash cards and make sure to scrub these images properly.”
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