ATLANTA, Georgia, October 19, 2026.
Deleting chats with an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant on your phone may not be as permanent as you think. In a bid to aid digital forensics, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed ORISA, a memory forensics tool for recovering deleted chats with locally hosted AI assistants on Android phones. The results allow digital investigators to examine a new type of artifact, but also raise privacy concerns for everyday users.
ORISA is designed to work with locally hosted AI assistants. Whilst the assistant is running, data can remain in the device’s runtime memory for deleted chats. ORISA analyses this data to find pieces of information from deleted chats.
In one experiment, the researchers created a fake AI assistant named Project Note Keeper using the ChatterUI application on Android. They provided it with 100 fake facts about a project and deleted the chat. ORISA recovered the data and formed a new runtime session. When they asked the recovered AI assistant to list the project notes, it provided them with 26 facts. The original session could only provide 14 facts, as the others were no longer in the assistant’s active memory. This shows that the tool can recover data that the AI is no longer using. The researchers used ORISA to recover chat data from 10 Android applications, 3 AI models, and 60 different configurations. However, as more activity occurs on the device, the data becomes more difficult to recover.
This research titled ‘Recovering and Rehosting Mobile Local LLM Conversations and Contexts via Memory Forensics’ was presented at the 2026 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. It was written by Ph.D. students Ken Xu (Lead Author), David Oygenblik, Runze Zhang, Mingxuan Yao, Research Scientist Muhammad Ibrahim, and Associate Professor Brendan Saltaformaggio. It was developed at the Cyber Forensics Innovation Laboratory at Georgia Tech in conjunction with the schools of Cybersecurity and Privacy and Electrical and Computer Engineering.
This new tool can allow investigators to understand what information users are providing to their AI assistant and what help they were receiving. This means that AI assistant activity can now be examined as a new artifact. For users, it acts as a reminder that whilst something has been deleted, it may not actually be gone.
This research was covered by several forensic resources this week. Forensic Focus highlighted the research, saying it provides a new artifact type for mobile forensic examiners.
It is important to note that this research only relates to locally hosted AI assistants. This does not relate to chatbots hosted in the cloud where chat data is stored on company servers. The data is also recovered under controlled lab conditions, meaning it will depend on how quickly the device can be examined. If this tool were used on a real device, there would be legal and evidential concerns around authenticity.
References:
Georgia Tech College of Computing. “Deleted AI Chats May Leave Clues Behind.” https://www.cc.gatech.edu/news/deleted-ai-chats-may-leave-clues-behind
Newswise (Georgia Institute of Technology). “Deleted AI Chats May Leave Clues Behind.” Released October 15, 2026; original release dated October 13, 2026. https://www.newswise.com/articles/deleted-ai-chats-may-leave-clues-behind
Forensic Focus. “DFIR News, 19 Oct 2026.” https://www.forensicfocus.com/news/headlines/dfir-news-19-oct-2026/
The Outpost (summary of Futurity and Newswise coverage). https://theoutpost.ai/news-story/deleted-ai-chats-leave-memory-traces-that-can-be-recovered-georgia-tech-researchers-find-32302/
Newswise, Crime and Forensic Science channel (related items). https://www.newswise.com/articles/channels/crime-and-forensic-science
Forensic Spot. “Fingerprint Processing Can Reduce DNA Recovery, New Forensic Study Finds.” October 19, 2026. https://forensicspot.com/news/fingerprint-processing-can-reduce-dna-recovery-new-forensic-study-finds
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