Book Image

Learning Android Forensics - Second Edition

By : Oleg Skulkin, Donnie Tindall, Rohit Tamma
Book Image

Learning Android Forensics - Second Edition

By: Oleg Skulkin, Donnie Tindall, Rohit Tamma

Overview of this book

Many forensic examiners rely on commercial, push-button tools to retrieve and analyze data, even though there is no tool that does either of these jobs perfectly. Learning Android Forensics will introduce you to the most up-to-date Android platform and its architecture, and provide a high-level overview of what Android forensics entails. You will understand how data is stored on Android devices and how to set up a digital forensic examination environment. As you make your way through the chapters, you will work through various physical and logical techniques to extract data from devices in order to obtain forensic evidence. You will also learn how to recover deleted data and forensically analyze application data with the help of various open source and commercial tools. In the concluding chapters, you will explore malware analysis so that you’ll be able to investigate cybersecurity incidents involving Android malware. By the end of this book, you will have a complete understanding of the Android forensic process, you will have explored open source and commercial forensic tools, and will have basic skills of Android malware identification and analysis.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Static analysis of malicious Android applications

To perform dynamic analysis of the previously identified malicious Android application, we ran it in a controlled environment with the help of Joe Sandbox. In contrast to dynamic analysis, static analysis allows an examiner to understand malware behavior without actually running it. Let's start the static analysis of our malware sample, beginning with unpacking it.

Unpacking Android applications

To view the contents of an APK file, you can use any archiver. A good example is 7-Zip, a free and open source archiver, which is available here: https://www.7-zip.org/download.html.

To unpack an APK file, right-click on it, choose 7-Zip, and then Open archive:

Contents of an...