Book Image

Practical Mobile Forensics - Second Edition

By : Heather Mahalik, Rohit Tamma, Satish Bommisetty
Book Image

Practical Mobile Forensics - Second Edition

By: Heather Mahalik, Rohit Tamma, Satish Bommisetty

Overview of this book

Mobile phone forensics is the science of retrieving data from a mobile phone under forensically sound conditions. This book is an update to Practical Mobile Forensics and it delves into the concepts of mobile forensics and its importance in today's world. We will deep dive into mobile forensics techniques in iOS 8 - 9.2, Android 4.4 - 6, and Windows Phone devices. We will demonstrate the latest open source and commercial mobile forensics tools, enabling you to analyze and retrieve data effectively. You will learn how to introspect and retrieve data from cloud, and document and prepare reports for your investigations. By the end of this book, you will have mastered the current operating systems and techniques so you can recover data from mobile devices by leveraging open source solutions.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Practical Mobile Forensics - Second Edition
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Chapter 13. Parsing Third-Party Application Files

Third-party applications have taken the smartphone community by storm. Most smartphone owners have more than one app on their device that they rely on to chat, game, get directions, or share pictures. According to http://www.statista.com/statistics/276623/number-of-apps-available-in-leading-app-stores/, there are almost 4 million apps existing worldwide for the various smartphones. Apple App Store offers approximately 1.5 million apps, Google Play offers 1.6 million, Amazon offers 400,000 apps, and Windows offers 340,000. This number is expected to grow exponentially through 2017.

The goal of this chapter is to introduce you the various applications seen on Android, iOS devices, and Windows Phones. Each application will vary due to versions and devices, but their underlying structures are similar. We will look at how the data is stored and why preference files are important to your investigation.

We will cover the following topics in detail...