Android Forensics: Tools and Techniques for Manual Data Extraction

Abstract

With the world over shifting to mobile devices for both personal and official work, the number of digital frauds is increasing exponentially. In order to investigate the ever growing cyber- crime on easily available and affordable computing devices, there is a need to develop manual techniques and not solely rely on forensic tools. This additional skill set of a forensic investigator would be useful in analyzing large spectrum of mobile versions and also extract additional data which would be very vital for a given case. This paper brings out the methodology to analyze and examine an android mobile phone in an easy and simple manner without the help of commercial tools. This work utilizes the concept of virtual android device created on Genymotion emulator to examine the data stored in it and then carry out a comparison with an actual android phone.

Keywords: Mobile forensics, Physical Extraction, Logical Extraction, Genymotion, Rooting