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

Physical acquisition


Physical acquisition strikes the best balance between extraction speed, ease of use, and the amount of information being extracted. This process does not require disassembling the phone or using any special hardware. A micro USB (or Apple Lightning) cord, a PC (or Mac), and forensic software for physical acquisition (refer to the following section) are all that's required. For iOS devices newer than iPhone 4, Elcomsoft iOS Forensic Toolkit is currently the only physical acquisition solution available.

Physical acquisition extracts the maximum amount of information from the device. For unencrypted devices, unallocated space will be extracted together with the filesystem, allowing experts to carve the dump for destroyed evidence. Encrypted devices handle unallocated space differently. For example, Apple iOS always uses full-disk encryption that does not keep encryption keys to released data blocks. As a result, unallocated areas can be accessed, but cannot be decrypted...