A Dynamic Credible Factory Reset Mechanism of Personal Data in Android Device

Abstract

Due to plenty of confidential and private information stored on the phone, the security of it has become more prominent increasingly. The private information storing on Android devices can be recovered easily even if it is reset by traditional data factory reset process. It is extremely unsafe and unreliable especially for the phone lent to others. In this paper, we proposed a dynamic credible factory mechanism of personal data in Android device to protect privacy. Not only it can allow users to factory reset the system quickly and safely, but it also thoroughly crushes application data files while applications are not deleted. The mechanism is based on a private file recognition algorithm that checks the properties of file tree dynamically proposed in the paper and credible erase on data blocks pointed from special inode of private files on the flash storage under the condition of no remounting and no rebooting. It aims to provide a more secure, fast crush method in Android system to prevent individual private data being recovered maliciously. We implemented our credible factory mechanism to evaluate their performance.