A forensic analysis of the Google Home: repairing compressed data without error correction
Cryptography and Security
2022-10-04 v1 Information Retrieval
Abstract
This paper provides a detailed explanation of the steps taken to extract and repair a Google Home's internal data. Starting with reverse engineering the hardware of a commercial off-the-shelf Google Home, internal data is then extracted by desoldering and dumping the flash memory. As error correction is performed by the CPU using an undisclosed method, a new alternative method is shown to repair a corrupted SquashFS filesystem, under the assumption of a single or double bitflip per gzip-compressed fragment. Finally, a new method to handle multiple possible repairs using three-valued logic is presented.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2210.00856,
title = {A forensic analysis of the Google Home: repairing compressed data without error correction},
author = {Hadrien Barral and Georges-Axel Jaloyan and Fabien Thomas-Brans and Matthieu Regnery and Rémi Géraud-Stewart and Thibaut Heckmann and Thomas Souvignet and David Naccache},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.00856},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
28 pages, modified version of paper that appeared originally at Forensic Science International: Digital Investigation