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Learning Android Forensics, - Second Edition

You're reading from  Learning Android Forensics, - Second Edition

Product type Book
Published in Dec 2018
Publisher
ISBN-13 9781789131017
Pages 328 pages
Edition 2nd Edition
Languages
Concepts
Authors (2):
Donnie Tindall Donnie Tindall
Profile icon Donnie Tindall
LinkedIn
Donnie Tindall is a Principal Incident Response Consultant with the Crypsis Group, where he handles incident response engagements encompassing the full lifecycle of cyber security events. His corporate and consulting background is primarily in conducting sensitive forensics examinations for federal government clients, particularly the U.S. military and the Intelligence Community. Before moving into Incident Response, Donnie had an extensive background in mobile forensics, application security research, and exploitation. He is also an IACIS Certified Forensic Computer Examiner and former Community Instructor of FOR585, the SANS Institute's smartphone forensics course.
See other products by Donnie Tindall
Rohit Tamma Rohit Tamma
Profile icon Rohit Tamma
LinkedIn
Rohit Tamma is a senior program manager currently working with Microsoft. With over 10 years of experience in the field of security, his background spans management and technical consulting roles in the areas of application and cloud security, mobile security, penetration testing, and secure coding. Rohit has also co-authored Learning Android Forensics, from Packt, which explain various ways to perform forensics on mobile platforms. You can contact him on Twitter at @RohitTamma.
See other products by Rohit Tamma
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Table of Contents (12) Chapters

Preface 1. Introducing Android Forensics 2. Setting up the Android Forensic Environment 3. Understanding Data Storage on Android Devices 4. Extracting Data Logically from Android Devices 5. Extracting Data Physically from Android Devices 6. Recovering Deleted Data from an Android Device 7. Forensic Analysis of Android Applications 8. Android Forensic Tools Overview 9. Identifying Android Malware 10. Android Malware Analysis 11. Other Books You May Enjoy

Forensic Analysis of Android Applications

This chapter will cover application analysis. This chapter will focus on analyzing the data that would be recovered using any of the logical or physical techniques detailed in Chapter 4, Extracting Data Logically from Android Devices, and Chapter 5, Extracting Data Physically from Android Devices. It will also rely heavily on the storage methods discussed in Chapter 2, Setting Up the Android Forensic Environment; we will see numerous SQLite databases, XML files, and other file types from various locations within the file hierarchy described in that chapter. By the end of this chapter, the reader should be familiar with the following:

  • Application analysis overview
  • Why do app analysis?
  • Third-party applications and various methods used by popular applications to store and obfuscate data

Application analysis overview

Forensically analyzing an application is as much of an art as it is a science. There are myriad ways an application can store, or obfuscate, its data. Different versions of the same application may even store the same data differently. Developers are really only limited by their imagination (and Android platform restrictions) when it comes to choosing how to store their data. Because of these factors, application analysis is a moving target; methods an examiner uses one day may be completely irrelevant the next.

The end goal of forensically analyzing an application is consistently the same: to understand what the app was used for, and to find user data.

In this chapter, we will look at the current version of many common applications. Because apps can, and do, change how they store data through updates, nothing in this chapter is a definitive guide...

Why do app analysis?

For starters, even standard phone functions such as contacts, calls, and SMS are done through applications on Android devices, so even acquiring basic data requires analyzing an application. Secondly, a person's app usage can tell you a lot about them: where they've been (and when they were there), who they've communicated with, and even what they may be planning in the future.

Many phones come with more than 20 pre-installed applications. An examiner has no real way of knowing which of these apps could contain information useful for an investigation, and therefore they must all be analyzed. An examiner may be tempted to skip over certain apps that would appear to have little useful data, such as games. This would be a bad idea, though; many popular games have a built-in chat feature, which could yield useful information. Our analysis will focus...

Layout of this chapter

For each application we examine, we will provide a package name and files of interest. All apps store their data in the /data/data or /data/user_de/0 (newer devices) directory by default; apps can also use the SD card if they ask for this permission when the app is installed. The package name is the name of the directory for the application in one of these directories. The paths in the Files of interest section are from the root of the package name. Paths to data on the SD card are shown beginning with /sdcard. Do not expect to find data paths beginning with /sdcard in the /data/data or /data/user_de/0 directory of the application!

We will begin by looking at some of Google's applications, because these are pre-installed on the majority of devices (though they do not have to be). Then we will look at third-party applications that can be found on Google...

Summary

This chapter has been an in-depth study of specific Android applications, and how/where they store their data. We looked at 19 specific applications, and discovered 9 different methods of storing and obfuscating data. Knowing that applications store their data in a variety of ways should help an examiner have a better understanding of the data that they are examining, and hopefully push them to look harder when they can't find data they expect an app to have. An examiner has to be able to adapt to the changing world of application analysis; since applications constantly update, an examiner has to be able to update their own methods and abilities in order to keep up.

The next chapter will take a look at several free/open source and commercial tools to image and analyze Android devices.

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Authors (2)

Left arrow icon
Profile icon Donnie Tindall
LinkedIn
Donnie Tindall is a Principal Incident Response Consultant with the Crypsis Group, where he handles incident response engagements encompassing the full lifecycle of cyber security events. His corporate and consulting background is primarily in conducting sensitive forensics examinations for federal government clients, particularly the U.S. military and the Intelligence Community. Before moving into Incident Response, Donnie had an extensive background in mobile forensics, application security research, and exploitation. He is also an IACIS Certified Forensic Computer Examiner and former Community Instructor of FOR585, the SANS Institute's smartphone forensics course.
Read more
See other products by Donnie Tindall
Profile icon Rohit Tamma
LinkedIn
Rohit Tamma is a senior program manager currently working with Microsoft. With over 10 years of experience in the field of security, his background spans management and technical consulting roles in the areas of application and cloud security, mobile security, penetration testing, and secure coding. Rohit has also co-authored Learning Android Forensics, from Packt, which explain various ways to perform forensics on mobile platforms. You can contact him on Twitter at @RohitTamma.
See other products by Rohit Tamma
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