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

Android platform fragmentation


Android is a heavily fragmented platform. Nearly 1,300 manufacturers and over 24,000 device models introduce a huge degree of variance:

Source: http://opensignal.com/reports/2015/08/android-fragmentation/

Hardware specifications demonstrate wild variations in screen size, resolution, and display ratio, CPU, SoC, and even architectures (ARMv7, ARMv8, and Intel's x86/x64 are among the most popular Android platforms). Android devices also vary in the version of the core OS and available API's. Compare this to Apple's iOS:

iOS and Android distribution charts (April 2016)

Android devices come with many different versions of Android and many different API levels that are available at any given time. For the purpose of mobile forensics, this means that one must either become familiar with the acquisition and protection specifics of all versions of Android or revert to using a dedicated Android acquisition product.

More information on Android fragmentation is available...