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

Extracting metadata – GPS analysis


What is metadata? Well, this is quite an embarrassing question! In an ambiguous way, metadata is data that describes data or information about information. In general, metadata is extra hidden information generated and embedded automatically in a digital file. The definition of metadata differs depending on the context in which it's used and the community that refers to it. It can be considered as machine-understandable information, or can be referred to as records that describe digital records. In fact, metadata can be subdivided into three important types: descriptive (including elements like author, title, abstract, and keywords), structural (describing how an object is constituted, and how elements are arranged), and administrative (including elements like date and time of creation, data type, and other technical details).

For example, camera settings (like camera marker, camera model, exposure time, ISO speed, focal length, shutter speed, and so on...