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)

Acquiring Android SD cards

As discussed previously in this chapter and in previous chapters, the SD card can refer to a physical, external SD card or a partition within the flash memory. A removable external SD card can be imaged separately from the device through a write-blocker with typical computer forensics tools, or using the dd/nanddump techniques shown previously, although the former is usually faster due to not needing to write data over netcat.

Physically imaging an SD card is extremely similar to the physical imaging that we discussed previously; in fact, if the SD card is symbolically linked to the /data partition, it would be acquired as part of the /data partition, as seen in the Autopsy section's screenshots. The only difference in the process is that if the SD card is being imaged, the output file cannot be written to the SD card! This means that using the...