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 physical acquisition


When approaching an Android smartphone, there is no straightforward route to physical acquisition. Is the device encrypted? Do you happen to know the passcode? Do you have a bootloader that is unlocked (or at least semi-unlocked)? Does the device have root access installed, or do you have the means to root it? Is a service backdoor available on a particular model? Depending on these factors, you may be able to pursue one or another acquisition method.

Encryption

Before we go on discussing the various physical acquisition methods, let's make one thing clear: device encryption may affect your ability to access user data. There may be a possibility to extract decryption keys, which in turn, depends on the version of Android and whether or not the phone was made by Samsung.

Prior to Android 5.0 Lollipop, Google used to utilize (and push to Android Open Source Project (AOSP)) a seriously flawed encryption method. This method was compromised as experts were able to extract...