Survey of Digital Forensics Technologies and Tools for Android based Intelligent Devices

During the rapid development of mobile wireless technologies and applications, the Android operating system, due to its open-source characteristics, has become the most popular development platform in the smartphone market. Meanwhile, as Android-based intelligent mobiles devices experience a rapid increase in numbers, high-tech crimes involving such devices have become more versatile, affecting an ever increasing amount of data, thus making digital evidence an indispensable part of the evidence that needs to be seriously dealt with during crime investigations. Consequently, understanding the internal structure of Android and the various data operations in the file systems becomes necessary in Android-based digital forensics. In this paper, the authors survey the state-of-the-art of technologies in Android-based digital forensics and some popular tools in the aspects of data recovery and acquisition, file system analysis and data analysis. They also discuss some technical challenges and point out future research directions in Android-based digital forensics.