You're reading from Practical Mobile Forensics - Fourth Edition

Product typeBook

Published inApr 2020

PublisherPackt

ISBN-139781838647520

Edition4th Edition

Tools

iOS Android

Concepts

Forensics

Authors (4):

Rohit Tamma

Oleg Skulkin

Heather Mahalik

Satish Bommisetty

View More author details

Understanding Android

In the previous chapters, we covered details about iOS devices, including the filesystem structure, key artifacts, backup files, and acquisition and analysis methods. Starting with this chapter, we will focus on the Android platform and how to perform forensics on Android devices. Having a good understanding of the Android ecosystem, security constraints, filesystems, and other features would prove useful during a forensic investigation. Gaining knowledge of these fundamentals would help a forensic expert to make informed decisions while conducting an investigation.

We will cover the following topics in this chapter:

The evolution of Android
The Android architecture
Android security
The Android file hierarchy
The Android filesystem

The evolution of Android

Android is a Linux-based mobile operating system developed for touchscreen mobile devices. It is developed by a consortium of companies known as the Open Handset Alliance (OHA), with the primary contributor and commercial marketer being Google. The Android operating system has evolved significantly since its inaugural release date. Android was officially launched to the public in 2008, with Android version 1.0. With the Android 1.5 Cupcake release in 2009, the tradition of naming Android versions after confectionery was born. The version names were also released in alphabetical order for the next 10 years. However, in 2019, Google announced that they were ending the confectionery-based naming, and were using numerical ordering for future versions. In the initial years, Android versions were updated more than twice a year, but in more recent years, version...

The Android architecture

To effectively understand forensic concepts when dealing with Android, you should have a basic understanding of the Android architecture. Just like a computer, any computing system that interacts with the user and performs complicated tasks requires an operating system to handle the tasks effectively. This operating system (whether it's a desktop operating system or a mobile phone operating system) is responsible for managing the resources of the system, to provide a way for the applications to talk to the hardware or physical components to accomplish certain tasks. Android is currently the most popular mobile operating system designed to power mobile devices. You can find out more about this at https://developer.android.com/about/android.html.

Android, as an open source operating system, releases its code under the Apache License, one of the many...

Android security

Android was designed with a specific focus on security. Android as a platform offers and enforces certain features that safeguard the user data present on the mobile through multilayered security. There are certain safe defaults that will protect the user, and there are certain offerings that can be leveraged by the development community to build secure applications. As a forensic investigator, understanding the internals of Android security is crucial as it helps to identify the best techniques to apply in a given situation, the technical limitations of certain techniques, and so on.

The next few sections will help us understand more about Android's security features and offerings.

A detailed explanation on Android security can be found at https://source.android.com/security/.

...

The Android file hierarchy

In order to perform forensic analysis on any system (desktop or mobile), it's important to understand the underlying file hierarchy. A basic understanding of how Android organizes its data in files and folders helps a forensic analyst narrow down their research to specific issues. Just as with any other operating system, Android uses several partitions. This chapter provides an insight into some of the most significant partitions and the content stored in them.

It's worth mentioning again that Android uses the Linux kernel. Hence, if you are familiar with Unix-like systems, you will understand the file hierarchy in Android very well. For those who are not very well acquainted with the Linux model, here is some basic information: in Linux, the file hierarchy is a single tree, with the top of the tree being denoted as / (called the root). This...

The Android filesystem

Understanding the filesystem is one essential part of forensic methodologies. Knowledge about the properties and the structure of a filesystem proves to be useful during forensic analysis. The 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. As is true in Linux, Android utilizes mount points, and not drives (that is, C: or E:).

In Linux, mounting is an act of attaching an additional filesystem to the currently accessible filesystem of a computer. The filesystems in Linux are not accessed by drive names but instead are organized into a multi-level hierarchy with a directory called root at the top. Each new filesystem is added into this single filesystem tree when it is mounted.

It...

Summary

In this chapter, we covered the Android operating system's underlying features, filesystems, and other details that are useful in a forensic investigation. We learned about interesting security capabilities that are built into Android. Unlike iOS, several variants of Android exist as many devices run the Android operating system, and each may have different filesystems and unique features. The fact that Android is open and customizable also changes the playing field of digital forensics. This knowledge will be helpful to understand forensic acquisition techniques.

In the next chapter, we will discuss how to set up a forensic workstation before performing the analysis.

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Authors (4)

Rohit Tamma

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.
Read more about Rohit Tamma

Oleg Skulkin

Oleg Skulkin is the Head of Digital Forensics and Malware Analysis Laboratory at Group-IB. Oleg has worked in the fields of digital forensics, incident response, and cyber threat intelligence and research for over a decade, fueling his passion for uncovering new techniques used by hidden adversaries. Oleg has authored and co-authored multiple blog posts, papers, and books on related topics and holds GCFA and GCTI certifications.
Read more about Oleg Skulkin

Heather Mahalik

Heather Mahalik is the senior director of digital intelligence at Cellebrite. She is a senior instructor and author for the SANS Institute, and she is also the course lead for the FOR585 Smartphone Forensic Analysis In-Depth course. With 18 years of experience in digital forensics, she continues to thrive on smartphone investigations, digital forensics, forensic course development and instruction, and research on application analysis and smartphone forensics.
Read more about Heather Mahalik

Satish Bommisetty

Satish Bommisetty is a security architect currently working with JDA. His primary areas of interest include web and mobile application security, cloud security, and iOS forensics. He has presented at security conferences, such as ClubHACK and C0C0n. Satish is one of the top bug bounty hunters and is listed in the halls of fame of Google, Facebook, PayPal, Microsoft, Yahoo, Salesforce, and more, for identifying and reporting their security vulnerabilities. You can reach him on Twitter at @satishb3.
Read more about Satish Bommisetty

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