Is Data Retention Still Necessary in the Age of Smartphones?

It is well known that smartphone operating systems persistently store location information in their local storage for various reasons. However, less well known is probably the fact that also various applications do this, too. In this article we will give you some hints where you can find this data on Android smartphones as well as we will present a system with which all this information can be extracted and visualized at the same time. We will also provide you with a comparison of the quality and quantity of location data gathered through data retention in contrast to the data gathered by forensic acquisition.

Our whole article can be read here.

Cracking the Face Recognition Lock on Android

Since Android 4.0 is available, the user has the possibility to unlock his smartphone by looking in the front-camera. This feature is called face unlock.

Just some hours after Google has presented the new Android version including this feature, it was broken by some blogger who just hold a picture of the person the smartphone belongs to in front of the locked smartphone. As a proof, there are plenty videos on youtube. With this demonstration in mind, you have to come to the conclusion that face recognition isn’t a real lock feature, its more a fancy way of the old screen lock were you just have to swipe over the display. Continue reading “Cracking the Face Recognition Lock on Android”

8th Annual IFIP WG11.9 International Conference on Digital Forensics

We published and presented the paper “Forensic Acquisition of Location Data from Android Smartphones” at the IFIP WG11.9 conference in January this year. This paper covers the forensic acquisition of location data from Android smartphones (system and applications) and the corresponding generation of movement profiles. It will be published in the upcoming edition of “Advances in Digital Forensics”.