Book Image

Learning Android Forensics - Second Edition

By : Oleg Skulkin, Donnie Tindall, Rohit Tamma
Book Image

Learning Android Forensics - Second Edition

By: Oleg Skulkin, Donnie Tindall, Rohit Tamma

Overview of this book

Many forensic examiners rely on commercial, push-button tools to retrieve and analyze data, even though there is no tool that does either of these jobs perfectly. Learning Android Forensics will introduce you to the most up-to-date Android platform and its architecture, and provide a high-level overview of what Android forensics entails. You will understand how data is stored on Android devices and how to set up a digital forensic examination environment. As you make your way through the chapters, you will work through various physical and logical techniques to extract data from devices in order to obtain forensic evidence. You will also learn how to recover deleted data and forensically analyze application data with the help of various open source and commercial tools. In the concluding chapters, you will explore malware analysis so that you’ll be able to investigate cybersecurity incidents involving Android malware. By the end of this book, you will have a complete understanding of the Android forensic process, you will have explored open source and commercial forensic tools, and will have basic skills of Android malware identification and analysis.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Android filesystem overview

Understanding the filesystem is very important in Android forensics, as it helps us to gain knowledge on how data is stored and retrieved. This knowledge about properties and the structure of a filesystem proves to be useful during forensic analysis. Filesystem refers to the way data is stored, organized, and retrieved from a volume. A basic installation may be based on one volume split into several partitions; here, each partition can be managed by a different filesystem. Microsoft Windows users are familiar with FAT32 or NTFS filesystems, whereas Linux users are more familiar with EXT2 or EXT4 filesystems. As is true in Linux, Android utilizes mount points and not drives (that is, C: or E:). Each filesystem defines its own rules for managing the files on the volume. Depending on these rules, each filesystem offers a different speed for file retrieval...