Write Blocker for Internet of Things Flash Technologies

Write Blockers are an important tool preserving digital evidence integrity and protecting the data chain of custody during a digital forensics investigation, which is crucial to the admissibility and reliability of evidence in court. One area in which write blocking tools are lacking is the Internet of Things (IoT) space. There are unique challenges to the IoT storage technologies and write-blocking them, mainly the lack of standardization in the IoT space. To address it, in this paper, we propose the design of novel write blocking tools for IoT flash technologies. We first develop a set of requirements inspired by the existing requirements for hard drive write blockers as defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Afterwards, we implement a Serial Peripheral Interace (SPI) flash write blocker in both hardware and software. Furthermore, a demonstration is presented to show effectiveness of the proposed write blocking systems, and the future work is proposed.