Book Image

Practical Mobile Forensics - Second Edition

By : Heather Mahalik, Rohit Tamma, Satish Bommisetty
Book Image

Practical Mobile Forensics - Second Edition

By: Heather Mahalik, Rohit Tamma, Satish Bommisetty

Overview of this book

Mobile phone forensics is the science of retrieving data from a mobile phone under forensically sound conditions. This book is an update to Practical Mobile Forensics and it delves into the concepts of mobile forensics and its importance in today's world. We will deep dive into mobile forensics techniques in iOS 8 - 9.2, Android 4.4 - 6, and Windows Phone devices. We will demonstrate the latest open source and commercial mobile forensics tools, enabling you to analyze and retrieve data effectively. You will learn how to introspect and retrieve data from cloud, and document and prepare reports for your investigations. By the end of this book, you will have mastered the current operating systems and techniques so you can recover data from mobile devices by leveraging open source solutions.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Practical Mobile Forensics - Second Edition
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Reverse engineering Android apps


The examiner may need to deal with applications that stand as a barrier to accessing the required information. For instance, take the case of the gallery on a phone that is locked by an app locker application. In this case, in order to access the pictures and videos stored in the gallery, you first need to enter the passcode to the app locker. Hence, it would be interesting to know how the app locker app stores the password on the device. You might look into the SQLite database files. However, if they are encrypted, then it's hard to even predict that it's a password. Reverse engineering applications would be helpful in such cases where you want to better understand the application and how the application stores the data.

To state it in simple terms, reverse engineering is the process of retrieving source code from an executable. Reverse engineering an Android app is done in order to understand the functioning of the app, data storage, the security mechanisms...