Learning Android Forensics

By : Oleg Skulkin, Tindall, Rohit Tamma

2 (2)

Buy this Book

Learning Android Forensics

2 (2)

By: Oleg Skulkin, Tindall, Rohit Tamma

Buy this Book

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.

Preface

Who this book is for

What this book covers

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Free Chapter

Introducing Android Forensics

Mobile forensics

The mobile forensics approach

Challenges in mobile forensics

Android architecture

Android security

Android hardware components

Android boot process

Summary

Setting up the Android Forensic Environment

Android forensic setup

Android Debug Bridge

Rooting Android

Summary

Understanding Data Storage on Android Devices

Android partition layout

Android file hierarchy

Application data storage on the device

Android filesystem overview

Summary

Extracting Data Logically from Android Devices

Logical extraction overview

Manual ADB data extraction

ADB backup extractions

ADB dumpsys

Bypassing Android lock screens

Android SIM card extractions

Summary

Extracting Data Physically from Android Devices

Physical extraction overview

Extracting data physically with dd

Extracting data physically with nanddump

Extracting data physically with Magnet ACQUIRE

Analyzing a full physical image

Imaging and analyzing Android RAM

Acquiring Android SD cards

Advanced forensic methods

Summary

Recovering Deleted Data from an Android Device

Data recovery overview

Recovering deleted data from SD cards

Recovering deleted records from SQLite databases

Recovering deleted data from internal memory

Recovering deleted data using file carving

Summary

Forensic Analysis of Android Applications

Application analysis overview

Why do app analysis?

Layout of this chapter

Summary

Android Forensic Tools Overview

Autopsy

Belkasoft Evidence Center

Magnet AXIOM

Summary

Identifying Android Malware

An introduction to Android malware

Android malware overview

Android malware identification

Summary

Android Malware Analysis

Dynamic analysis of malicious Android applications

Static analysis of malicious Android applications

Summary

Extracting data physically with dd

The dd command should be familiar to any examiner who has done traditional hard drive forensics. dd is a Linux command-line utility used by definition to convert and copy files, but is frequently used in forensics to create bit-by-bit images of entire drives. Many variations of dd also exist and are commonly used, such as dcfldd, dc3dd, ddrescue, and dccidd. As dd is built for Linux-based systems, it is frequently included on Android platforms. This means that a method for creating an image of the device often already exists on the device!

The dd command has many options that can be set; only the forensically important options are going to be covered in the following list. A full list of command options can be found at http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/dd.1.html. The format of the dd command is as follows: