Title: The process of recovering image and web page artifacts from the GPU

Issue Number: Vol. 7, No. 2
Year of Publication: 2018
Page Numbers: 132-141
Authors: Yazeed Albabtain , Baijian Yang
Journal Name: International Journal of Cyber-Security and Digital Forensics (IJCSDF)
- Hong Kong
DOI:  http://dx.doi.org/10.17781/P002380

Abstract:


The purpose of this research is to perform a graphics recovery process on the GPU in line with the principles of computer forensics. The research tested the possibility of recovering artifacts of last visited web pages and last opened images from the GPUs global memory. The experiment deployed the OpenCL framework and tested JPEG,TIFF,and BMPgraphicfileformatsof64x64pixels,100x100 pixels, 200x200 pixels, 245x256 pixels, 512x512 pixels, and 1024x1024 pixels in size. Other variables, such as the choice of OS, GPU, and GPU driver, were also tested to measure the effectiveness on the proposed method. The research indicates that recovering artifacts from the GPUs global memory is possible using a set of unique pixel patterns. The research highlights three challenges of implementing forensic techniques on GPUs: 1)elusive global memory allocation scheme of GPUs; 2) varyinglevels of supportfordifferentGPUdrivers; and 3) the prerequisite of using certain types of OS and applications