Overcoming Impediments to Cell Phone Forensics

Cell phones are an emerging but rapidly growing area of computer forensics. While cell phones are becoming more like desktop computers functionally, their organization and operation are quite different in certain areas. For example, most cell phones do not contain a hard drive and rely instead on flash memory for persistent storage. Cell phones are also designed more as special-purpose appliances that perform a set of predefined tasks using proprietary embedded software, rather than general-purpose extensible systems that run common operating system software. Such differences make the application of classical computer forensic techniques difficult. Also complicating the situation is the state of the art of present day cell phone forensic tools themselves and the way in which tools are applied. This paper identifies factors that impede cell phone forensics and describes techniques to address two resulting problems in particular: the limited coverage of available phone models by forensic tools, and the inadequate means for validating the correct functioning of forensic tools.