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Status Meeting at the Federal Ministry of Education and Research

As our work is sponsored by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research we had the chance to give a presentation of our ongoing work at a status meeting of the ministry in Bonn last week. It was a really interesting two day meeting because many other sponsored projects were invited, too.

Due to the fact that our Mobile-Sandbox attracted a lot of attention there were many interesting discussions afterwards. Let’s see how these discussions will influence the further development of the system.

We also had the chance to present our forensic framework – ADEL – in a poster session. The presented poster can be viewed here:

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Dagstuhl Seminar

Schloss Dagstuhl

I was invited to this years Dagstuhl Seminar “Forensic Computing” to give a talk on mobile phone forensics. For all of you who hadn’t been there, here is the abstract of my talk:

Due to the ubiquitous use of smartphones, and the high amount of stored data on these devices, they become an increasingly important source of digital evidence in forensic investigations and they also implicate a vast risk of a potentially privacy leak for its users. In this paper we describe a new version of our developed tool – ADEL – that is able to forensically extract and analyze data from SQLite databases on Android devices and is also able to build a movement profile out of these data. Within the scope of a study we compared the data, gathered with the help of ADEL, with the data which a mobile-telecommunication-provider has from his customers. In the conclusion we also give some hints on how to stop your droid from gathering this much location data.

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Reverse Engineering of the Android File System (YAFFS2)

We published a Technical-Report with id CS-2011-06 (ISSN 2191-5008) named Reverse Engineering of the Android File System (YAFFS2) today. This report originates from parts of the Diploma Thesis of Christian Zimmermann which was published earlier this year.

Abstract — YAFFS2 is a file system which is used in many modern smartphones. Allthough YAFFS2 is an open standard and there exists an open source implementation, the behavior of YAFFS2 is not very well understood. Additionally, several aspects like wear-leveling and garbage-collection are not well-specified in the standard so that their actual behavior has to be reverse engineered from the implementation. Here, we give an introduction to and describe the basic functionality of YAFFS2. We place a particular focus on the detailed analysis of both wear-leveling and garbage-collection mechanisms, since these are important within a forensic analysis of the file system.