An Analysis of the Integrity of Palm Images Acquired with PDD

With the growth of Personal Digital Assistants (PDA), pocket-sized digital music players and smart phones the need for digital forensic tools that can acquire and analyse these devices has also been growing. PDD is a utility designed to acquire images of the memory of Palm OS based PDAs for forensic analysis. The use of volatile Random Access Memory (RAM) by Palm PDAs can have an effect on forensic acquisitions as images are likely to be changing quite frequently due to background running applications. Also, if the PDA loses power completely, all of the data can be lost. This paper aims to analyse the integrity of forensic images acquired by PDD, and perform an analysis of these images. The results from testing and comparing images acquired by PDD revealed that verifying the integrity of these images can be quite difficult.