Mobile App Forensic Analysis

The plethora of mobile apps introduce critical challenges to digital forensics practitioners. On one hand, there are huge number of apps available on the market. On the other hand, there are lack of sufficient expert-knowledge about mobile apps, in term of what evidentiary data were generated, and where they were left by apps, locally on the device, or remotely on external third-party servers. In this talk, we will discuss the state of art work in this area, discuss the challenges DF practitioners are facing, and present our efforts in analyzing mobile apps.

Speaker bio: 

Dr. Yong Guan is an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and the Associate Director for Research of Information Assurance Center at Iowa State University. With the support of NSF, NIST, IARPA, and ARO, his research focuses on security and privacy issues, including digital forensics, network security, and privacy-enhancing technologies for the Internet. The resulted solutions have addressed issues in attack attribution, secure network coding, key management, localization, computer forensics, anonymity, and online frauds detection. He served as the general chair of 2008 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland 2008), co-organizer for ARO Workshop on Digital Forensics in 2009, and the co-coordinator of Digital Forensics Working Group at NSA/DHS CAE Principals Meetings. Dr. Guan has been recognized by ISU Award for Early Achievement in Research in 2007, the Litton Industries Professorship in 2007, NSF Career Award in 2007, and the Outstanding Community Service Award of IEEE Technical Committee on Security and Privacy in 2008. He serves as the cyber forensics coordinator for NIST Center of Excellence in Forensic Science – CSAFE, and focuses on the mobile app analysis project.