In the continuously evolving environment of the mobile world, digital forensic examiners can neither always nor exclusively rely on commercially available tools. The ability to handle low-level techniques is a must. In this chapter, we will go deep into some commonly used techniques to carve files, manually extract GPS data, and explain how things are at a lower level. This chapter will also cover some techniques for extracting strings from different objects (for example, smartphone images), and will describe the basics of applying reverse engineering on smartphone applications.
We will look at the following topics in this chapter:
Getting acquainted with file carving
Extracting metadata – GPS analysis
String dump and analysis
Encryption versus encoding versus hashing
Decompiling and disassembling
So let's get started with file carving!