Design and Implementation of Analysis Techniques for Fragmented Pages in the Flash Memory Image of Smartphones
Jung-Heum Park, Hyunji Chung, Sangjin Lee, Youngdong Son · Information Security and Cryptology · 2012
A cell phone is very close to the user and therefore should be considered in digital forensic investigation. Recently, the proportion of smartphone owners is increasing dramatically. Unlike the feature phone, users can utilize various mobile application in smartphone because it has high-performance operating system (e.g., Android, iOS). As acquisition and analysis of user data in smartphone are more important in digital forensic purposes, smartphone forensics has been studied actively. There are two way to do smartphone forensics. The first way is to extract user's data using the backup and debugging function of smartphones. The second way is to get root permission, and acquire the image of flash memory. And then, it is possible to reconstruct the filesystem, such as YAFFS, EXT, RFS, HFS+ and analyze it. However, this methods are not suitable to recovery and analyze deleted data from smartphones. This paper introduces analysis techniques for fragmented flash memory pages in smartphones. Especially, this paper demonstrates analysis techniques on the image that reconstruction of filesystem is impossible because the spare area of flash memory pages does not exist and the pages in unallocated area of filesystem.