Mobile Phone Forensics Challenges

This feature article is all about how the fast growth of the number and variety of mobile phones demands new skills from the digital forensic examiner.  There are several common obstacles that lie before any mobile forensic expert.  There are more operating systems for smartphones than for desktop computers.  The digital forensics examiner must be able to recognize a phone's make/model and know what connections to make and what data acquisition methods can be applied to the device.  It is important to be fully aware what an acquisition tool does and what can and cannot be extracted from the phone.  Lastly, there is currently no single software tool capable of extracting all of the data from any mobile phone available on the market.

Having identified the problems, this article will attempt to offer some advice on how some of these problems may be overcome in a practical sense.

INTRODUCTION
A great number of the mobile phones used worldwide require special knowledge and skills from forensic experts.  More often, it is not enough to be an experienced expert in computer forensics to understand all the peculiarities and difficulties of mobile forensics.  This article describes technical problems encountered by specialists in mobile forensics.

Operating systems and manufacturers
Market share of the end user desktop systems is divided between three major vendors: MS Windows, OS X from Apple Inc., and Linux OS variations.  That is the opposite for the OS's of mobile devices.  Each year brings to life a new top....