Book Image

Mastering Mobile Forensics

By : Soufiane Tahiri
Book Image

Mastering Mobile Forensics

By: Soufiane Tahiri

Overview of this book

Mobile forensics presents a real challenge to the forensic community due to the fast and unstoppable changes in technology. This book aims to provide the forensic community an in-depth insight into mobile forensic techniques when it comes to deal with recent smartphones operating systems Starting with a brief overview of forensic strategies and investigation procedures, you will understand the concepts of file carving, GPS analysis, and string analyzing. You will also see the difference between encryption, encoding, and hashing methods and get to grips with the fundamentals of reverse code engineering. Next, the book will walk you through the iOS, Android and Windows Phone architectures and filesystem, followed by showing you various forensic approaches and data gathering techniques. You will also explore advanced forensic techniques and find out how to deal with third-applications using case studies. The book will help you master data acquisition on Windows Phone 8. By the end of this book, you will be acquainted with best practices and the different models used in mobile forensics.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Mastering Mobile Forensics
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Preparing a Mobile Forensic Workstation
Index

Chapter 1. Mobile Forensics and the Investigation Process Model

Smartphone forensics is a relatively new and quickly emerging field of interest within the digital forensic and law enforcement community. Today's mobile devices are getting smarter, cheaper, and easily available to the common man for daily use.

Mobile forensics are a set of scientific methodologies with the goal of extracting digital evidence (in general) in a legal context. Extracting digital evidence means recovering, gathering, and analyzing the data stored within the internal memory of a mobile phone. Mobile forensics is a continuously evolving science, which involves permanently evolving techniques; it presents a real challenge to the forensic community and law enforcement due to the fast and unstoppable changes in technology.

To investigate the growing number of digital crimes and complaints, researchers have put in a lot of effort to develop the most affordable investigative model; in this chapter, we will place emphasis on the importance of paying real attention to the growing market of smartphones and the effort put in this area from a digital forensic point of view in order to bring about the most comprehensive investigation process.

This chapter will be oriented towards the importance of smartphone forensics in our continuously growing digital world; then, we will describe some smartphone forensic models and how they evolved through history. We will also be pointing out the challenges that today's investigators face in the smartphone forensics evidence acquisition process.

This chapter will cover the following topics:

  • Why mobile forensics?

  • Smartphone forensics models

  • Smartphone forensics challenges