Unlike the last two papers, today’s isn’t theoretical at all. It’s a straightforward experimental study of whether or not any data can be recovered from an Android phone that’s undergone a factory reset. Factory reset is supposed to render it safe to sell a phone on the secondhand market, which means any personal data belonging to the previous owner should be erased at least thoroughly enough that the new owner cannot get at it without disassembling the phone. (This is NIST logical media sanitization, for those who are familiar with those rules—digital sanitization, where the new owner cannot extract any data short of taking an electron microscope to the memory chip, would of course be better, but in the situations where the difference matters, merely having a cell phone may mean you have already failed.)

The paper’s core finding is also straightforward: due to a combination of UI design errors, major oversights in the implementation of the factory-reset feature, driver bugs, and the market’s insistence that flash memory chips have to pretend to be traditional spinning rust hard disks even though they don’t work anything like that, none of the phones in the study erased everything that needed to get erased. The details are confusingly presented, but they’re not that important anyway. It ends with a concrete set of recommendations for future improvements, which is nice to see.

There are a few caveats. The study only covers Android 2.3 through 4.3; it is unclear to me whether the situation is improved in newer versions of Android. They don’t discuss device encryption at all—this is at least available in all versions studied, and should completely mitigate the problem provided that a factory reset successfully wipes out the old encryption keys, and that there’s no way for unencrypted data to survive the encryption process. (Unfortunately, the normal setup flow for a new phone, at least in the versions I’ve used, asks for a bunch of sensitive info before offering to encrypt the phone. You can bypass this but it’s not obvious how.) It would be great if someone tested whether encryption is effective in practice.

Beyond the obvious, this is also an example of Android’s notorious update problem. Many of the cell carriers cannot be bothered to push security updates—or any updates—to phones once they have been sold. [1] They are also notorious for making clumsy modifications to the software that harm security, usability, or both. [2] In this case, this means driver bugs that prevent the core OS from erasing everything it meant to erase, and failure to deploy patches that made the secure erase mechanism work better. Nobody really has a good solution to that. I personally am inclined to say that neither the telcos nor Google should be in the business of selling phones, and conversely, the consumer electronics companies who are in that business should not have the opportunity to make any modifications to the operating system. Whatever the hardware is, it’s got to work with a stock set of drivers, and the updates have to come direct from Google. That would at least simplify the problem.

(Arguably Google shouldn’t be in the OS business either, but that’s a more general antitrust headache. One thing at a time.)