Investigating the effectiveness of privacy tools versus forensic tools

• Main Author: Ng, Yong Bin.
• Other Authors: Woo Wing Keong
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/52561
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

In the current information age, where people are increasingly connected through the Internet, privacy has become a huge concern. Disclosure of personal information through the Internet has posed a large threat to users. Although there are a variety of privacy tools out in the market, the privacy of users could still be compromised. As a result, this project has conducted an investigation on the effectiveness of the open- source privacy tools, which protects the privacy of users while using Internet Explorer (IE) to surf the Internet. In this project, preliminary investigations were performed on the 4 open-source privacy tools against 3 open-source forensic tools to study the various approaches of wiping process. From this preliminary investigation, there were 3 important factors that would determine the success of recovering a file from a forensic tool: the filename, the index pointer and the content in the disk sector. From the recovered results, the filename was the most common information that a forensic tool could recover. Furthermore, with the understanding of those approaches, it was used to evaluate the implementation of the 3 IE privacy tools (open-source) that protects the privacy of the user as they used IE browser. In addition, it also provided an insight on how vulnerable these tools could be when wiping the various types of digital trail. A further investigation was also conducted to examine the untouched digital trail, which was recorded by the Windows system as the user was using the privacy tool. As a result, a prototype implementation “blockProgram.vbs” was suggested and it successfully prevented the system from recording this trail. However, due to the ever-changing technology, there is no perfect privacy tool that is able to fully protect the user’s privacy. As such, further studies are needed to explore on the privacy tools as technology continues to advance.