Security is difficult

“We feel without exaggeration that this technology really represents a new paradigm in smartphone forensics,” Saltaformaggio says.

“It is very different from all the existing methodologies for analyzing both hard drives and volatile memories.”

The lead author says he was “amazed” by the lack of in-memory app data protection reckoning that information should be “shredded” after it is displayed.

Writing over expired screens will impact smartphone performance however and the team did not find an easy way to counter their forensic data extraction methods.

The team’s work builds extends early research which recovered the last screen displayed by an Android application.

/via The Register