Book Image

Mobile Forensics ??? Advanced Investigative Strategies

By : Oleg Afonin, Vladimir Katalov
Book Image

Mobile Forensics ??? Advanced Investigative Strategies

By: Oleg Afonin, Vladimir Katalov

Overview of this book

Investigating digital media is impossible without forensic tools. Dealing with complex forensic problems requires the use of dedicated tools, and even more importantly, the right strategies. In this book, you’ll learn strategies and methods to deal with information stored on smartphones and tablets and see how to put the right tools to work. We begin by helping you understand the concept of mobile devices as a source of valuable evidence. Throughout this book, you will explore strategies and "plays" and decide when to use each technique. We cover important techniques such as seizing techniques to shield the device, and acquisition techniques including physical acquisition (via a USB connection), logical acquisition via data backups, over-the-air acquisition. We also explore cloud analysis, evidence discovery and data analysis, tools for mobile forensics, and tools to help you discover and analyze evidence. By the end of the book, you will have a better understanding of the tools and methods used to deal with the challenges of acquiring, preserving, and extracting evidence stored on smartphones, tablets, and the cloud.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Mobile Forensics – Advanced Investigative Strategies
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

eMMC and deleted data


One of the few things that all mobile devices have in common is the choice of the type of internal storage. All Apple smartphones and tablets, most Android devices since Android 2.3 Gingerbread, all BlackBerry 10 smartphones, Windows Phone 8, Windows RT, and a lot of Windows 8/8.1 tablets use eMMC chips as their storage.

eMMC stands for embedded MMC, or embedded MultiMedia Card. To put it simply, eMMC is a non-removable memory card that is soldered onto a circuit board. Unlike plain flash memory chips, the eMMC standard uses a combination of NAND modules and an integrated storage controller built into a single chip. It is the storage controller that makes things so different to traditional storage media when it comes to recovering deleted information.

In broad general terms, the embedded storage controller takes care of all the reading and writing operations. In addition (and this is the important part), the eMMC specification defines a number of maintenance routines...