Smartphone Forensics: A Comparative Study of Common Mobile Phone Models

Smartphones are the most extensive repositories of user profile data such as activities related to personal and professional lives, working habits, and navigation histories. This stems from their rising inflow and pervasiveness. While some data may be retrieved quickly and simply, other (deleted) data may require the employment of cutting-edge forensic investigative tools. Smartphone applications, built on complex architectures (APIs, servers, storage, and cloud, etc.), typically require the use of specialized tools to gather, segregate, assess, analyze, and report on data, making acquisition and analysis more complex and time-consuming. This paper highlights the challenges of smartphone forensics while testing a range of Operating Systems (OSs) including Android, iOS, and Windows for the extraction of forensic artifacts. The results of both logical and physical acquisitions are presented. Depending on the data, extractions may also include methods such as installing an OS on the current server via a file transfer.