Smartphones are fast becoming an ubiquitous device used throughout the day to undertake a variety of activities which may have been traditionally completed using a PC. What are the implications in the rise of smartphones for forensic practitioners?
There are several challenges to acquiring evidence on smartphones:
1) if you turn the device on it may communicate with external sources and therefore taint the data. To avoid this you have to use Faraday cages
2) The data that you think is stored locally may be stored remotely. So you have to start on the assumption that important data is not located in the phone making acquisitions riskier for the one that is paying the forensic examiner.
3) storage is more limited so information that would reside on a 3 TB disk for decades can be gone in substantially less time.
4) Due to its size it is easier to dispose of
While there are others, these are that immediately come to mind.
Thanks Arturo Can you or anyone can guide me any good articles on this topic
Hello Osama,
Adding to what Arturo has said, there are also many ways to lock a phone - e.g. the SIM card might have a PIN (in which case shutting it down and booting the device up again may mean you lose access to it), and many modern smartphones are heavily encrypted.
Software and hardware, such as Cellebrite may not necessarily always have the very latest in their ability to jailbreak/root and ultimately access the phone data.
All device isolation techniques have their own pros and cons, so for example, Faraday cages are very expensive, but Faraday bags may mean many of the physical ports on a phone might be inaccessible (if you needed to charge it for example).
There are also complications with proprietary hardware and software - so for example, there are certain sat-nav companies who will only provide decryption to Cellebrite - in which case you have to send it off (and wait a certain amount of time) before you get the device/data back.
The link attached with this post has got a nice overview (it is more specific to Android, but definitely has some good points for all kinds of "smart" devices.
http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Android_Forensics.html?id=zDibrpXTfxMC&redir_esc=y
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