Book Image

Mobile Forensics ??? Advanced Investigative Strategies

By : Oleg Afonin, Vladimir Katalov
Book Image

Mobile Forensics ??? Advanced Investigative Strategies

By: Oleg Afonin, Vladimir Katalov

Overview of this book

Investigating digital media is impossible without forensic tools. Dealing with complex forensic problems requires the use of dedicated tools, and even more importantly, the right strategies. In this book, you’ll learn strategies and methods to deal with information stored on smartphones and tablets and see how to put the right tools to work. We begin by helping you understand the concept of mobile devices as a source of valuable evidence. Throughout this book, you will explore strategies and "plays" and decide when to use each technique. We cover important techniques such as seizing techniques to shield the device, and acquisition techniques including physical acquisition (via a USB connection), logical acquisition via data backups, over-the-air acquisition. We also explore cloud analysis, evidence discovery and data analysis, tools for mobile forensics, and tools to help you discover and analyze evidence. By the end of the book, you will have a better understanding of the tools and methods used to deal with the challenges of acquiring, preserving, and extracting evidence stored on smartphones, tablets, and the cloud.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Mobile Forensics – Advanced Investigative Strategies
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Chip-off


Chip-off acquisition is a highly advanced, destructive extraction technique that requires attaching wire leads to the PCB contacts or physically removing (desoldering) the phone's flash memory chip. Chip-off is considered more difficult compared to JTAG; however, the amount of information acquired via chip-off acquisition is similar to the amount of data acquired by JTAGging the device. Since most smartphones use standard eMMC flash modules, the process is standardized and typically presents no surprises to the examiner.

When imaging computer hard drives, one normally attempts to go as low level as possible. In the world of mobile forensic, the lowest-level access is not always the best. While reading the chips directly produces a complete raw dump of the memory chips, the investigator may be faced with an encrypted partition with no decryption keys stored anywhere around. In the case of Apple devices, many Samsung phones, and other devices (for example, the Android 5 Nexus line...