Georgia Tech researchers develop tool to recover deleted AI chats

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a digital forensic tool named ORISA, which is capable of recovering fragments of deleted conversations from AI assistants operating locally on Android devices.

The tool targets large language models that run directly on a phone rather than relying entirely on external cloud services. In these instances, conversation fragments may remain in the device's working memory, such as RAM or temporary storage, even after a user deletes the chat through the application interface.

During testing using the ChatterUI application, researchers provided 100 pieces of fictitious information to a virtual assistant and then deleted the session. ORISA successfully reconstructed 26 of those data points, a figure that actually exceeded the active context capacity of the original session. The study involved testing across 10 different applications and three AI models through 60 distinct experimental configurations.

While the tool demonstrates that local AI usage can offer more privacy by not sending data to the cloud, it also introduces new security risks. Researchers noted that the ability to recover data decreases as the phone is used, as new activities may overwrite the old data in the memory. ORISA is currently designed for forensic investigators and is not available to the general public.