Forensics is an extremely technical discipline, so this chapter was meant to help clarify the principles of file carving, to demystify GPS data, and to clearly explain how photos are made binary. We went through some deep technical aspects of computing in general, we saw some file formats and how metadata is stored within them, we went through characters and string data types, and explained how to extract strings from smartphone dumps. This chapter (hopefully) also clarified the difference between some common string related concepts like encryption, encoding, and hashing.
Seeing the importance of understanding how smartphone applications behave in a forensic context, we picked over some techniques of reverse code engineering smartphone applications.
Now that we are familiar enough with some low-level techniques, we can go ahead and discuss iOS forensics in the next chapter.