A Comprehensive Perspective on Mobile Forensics

Abstract

The modern-day smartphones are the result of the technological progression that is happening in this digital world. This technological advancement has brought an incremental augmentation where these were not perceived as critical by the smartphone users. Also, the computational capability and networking competence has been dragooned constantly to maintain the momentum with the ever-expanding workload demands. This scenario has endorsed the smart gadgets such as smartphones and tablets to accomplish the growing complex challenges. In this digital era, the next generation users are substituting the conventional way of preference such as the personal computers and laptops with smartphone for the social connectedness, e-commerce, financial transaction, market updates, latest news, or even editing images. Users willingly install various mobile apps on to their smartphone and consequently providing their valuable and sensitive personal information to their service providers without thinking and knowing the security lapses and repercussions. Considering the fact, the smartphones' size and its portability, these devices are much more susceptible of being stolen, becoming jeopardized, or being exploited for various cyber-attacks and other malevolent activities. Essentially, the hackers look forward to the new mobile vulnerabilities so that they exploit the revealed vulnerability once a newer edition of the respective mobile operating system is released. In view of the fact that the smartphones are too vulnerable to various exploits, the necessity for a digital investigation entrained to establish a separate domain named mobile forensics. This established forensic domain is specialized in acquiring, extracting, analyzing, and reporting the evidence that is obtained from the smartphone devices so that the exploiting artifacts and its respective actions are determined and located. This chapter puts forward the various processes involved with the mobile forensics that can be employed for examining the evidences of various cyber incidents. Furthermore, it discusses the various vulnerabilities with the iOS and Android mobile operating systems and how they are being exploited in detail. The chapter also discusses the various approaches of data extraction and the respective industry standard for the tools that are being utilized for the same.