This tool can recover deleted AI chats from your phone – how it works

When it comes to privacy, many individuals who use AI assistants opt for running them locally on their devices. This ensures that their data remains within the device, reducing the risk of it being exposed in the cloud. However, even if users delete their chat sessions, certain information from those exchanges can remain in the phone's memory. Georgia Tech researchers developed ORISA, a tool capable of searching this memory to recover remnants of deleted conversations.

To test ORISA, the researchers created a fictional note-keeping AI assistant using the ChatterUI Android app. They fed this assistant 100 pieces of fabricated information about a project and then deleted that data. Despite the deletion, ORISA was able to sift through the device's memory and uncover 26 of the original 100 facts. This success rate exceeded the 14 facts the assistant could access during its original session, as the remaining information had been pushed out of its active memory.

ORISA was designed to address a cybersecurity issue. Local AI assistants lack centralized logging and enforcement, which could allow malicious actors to manipulate models for illicit activities and then erase traces of their actions. Until now, investigators had struggled to recover useful evidence of such activities using forensic memory techniques.

ORISA tackles this challenge by exploiting batch tokens and key-value (KV) caches preserved in process memory, enabling the reconstruction of token sequences and the restoration of session-level attention states.

Although ORISA is primarily relevant to cybersecurity professionals, it also has implications for personal privacy. If used by cybercriminals, it could potentially be employed to recover deleted information from users' chats and recreate their queries using that data as context. However, ORISA's effectiveness is also contingent on time, as the researchers highlight that the harder it becomes to recover deleted information as more time passes due to the phone's memory being overwritten by new activity.

As always, the recommended advice remains: refrain from sharing sensitive information with chatbots, even when they are running locally on your device.