There are a huge number of mobile device models in use today, and almost every five months new models are manufactured, and most of them use closed operating systems, making forensic process difficult. Our goal is to bridge the gap by giving to the forensic community an in-depth look at mobile forensics techniques by detailing methods on how to gather evidence from mobile devices with different operating systems and how to use the appropriate model.
Seeing the daily increase in the use of smartphone, the unwilling-to-stop development of today's smartphone capabilities, and given the pace at which this development occurs, the forensics professionals, law enforcement, and researchers were and still are in need of producing a standardized framework to follow to assure a well driven investigation. Researches in this scope are not yet done, thus improvement is continually done to keep responding to permanent challenges offered by smartphone manufacturers and mobile operating systems vendors. In this chapter, we showed the importance of smartphone forensic field and discussed some models and frameworks applied in order to correctly lead forensic investigation cases. This chapter also discussed major smartphone forensic challenges, in an effort to help bypass some of the previously presented challenges when commercially available forensic tools cannot deal with some files or file types.
In the next chapter, we will see some low-level techniques that can be applied to gather forensically important evidences independently of the available forensics tools, operating systems, or device subjects of the eventual investigation.