Mobile industry need strong mobile forensic solutions

BANGALORE, INDIA: Mobile forensic is an interesting topic to discuss. Considering the fact in growth of mobile devices year-on-year, very few companies focus to offer mobile forensic solutions.

Recently, Abhigna NG from CIOL had an opportunity to discuss on the area of mobile forensic with Dave Golding, GM of Cellebrite APAC Pte Ltd, to understand more about Mobile forensic market and how India is geared up to address the niche market. Excerpts:

CIOL: Can you provide an overview on Cellebrite to our reader community?

Dave Golding: Founded in 1999 by a team of highly experienced telecom and mobile telephony professionals, Cellebrite is a global company known for its technological breakthroughs in the cellular industry.

The company's advanced retail mobile solutions are unique in offering in-store phone-to-phone content transfer, backup and restore, diagnostics, and application and content delivery. In addition, Cellebrite offers retailers monitoring, statistics and analysis of sales activities. With more 150,000 units deployed in 200 mobile carriers and retailers globally and with more than 250,000,000 transactions a year, Cellebrite has become a world leader in the mobile retail market.

In the forensics division, Cellebrite's UFED (Universal Forensic Extraction Device), a high-end mobile forensics solution, extracts, decodes and analyses actionable data from legacy and smartphones, handheld tablets and portable GPS devices for use in law enforcement. Cellebrite also supports the extraction and analysis of Chinese manufactured phones. There are more than 20,000 UFED units deployed to law enforcement, police and security agencies in 60 countries.

CIOL: If you have to highlight some of your mobile forensics tools, what would those be?

DG: Our mobile forensics products include:

UFED Touch - A standalone unit that enables data extraction using multiple methods - logical, file system and physical extraction - enabling the use of sophisticated proprietary technology to extract existing and deleted data and passwords from mobile devices.

UFED CHINEX - An additional tool enabling data extraction from phones with Chinese chipsets.

UFED Physical Analyzer - Advanced analysis decoding and reporting tool for extracted data.

UFED Logical Analyzer - Simplified data analysis and reporting tool.

UFED Reader - A tool enabling users to share analysis reports with other authorized personnel.

UFED Link Analysis - A tool enabling users to immediately identify connections and communication methods used between multiple mobile devices via data extraction reports.

UFED Phone Detective - A tool which can identify mobile phones by its physical attributes.

CIOL: How can the UFED (Universal Forensic Extraction Device) series can help India's law enforcement agencies?

DG: Cellebrite provides the law enforcement, military and other security bodies in India with its range of products, UFED Series, to extract, decode and analyze data from the widest range of mobile phones, portable GPSs, tablets and phones with Chinese chipsets. With these tools, authorized users can dig deeper into a mobile device's memory and obtain data which can reveal critical case related information.

Not only does Cellebrite's tools support the world's most popular mobile device platforms - iOS, BlackBerry and Android - but the existing and deleted data that the tools can extract and reveal include passwords, applications, emails, contacts, SMS's, GPS locations, images, videos and more.

Powerful analysis tools such as UFED Physical Analyzer and UFED Link Analysis can paint the bigger picture of an investigation by unveiling communication links and understanding the common communication method between suspects.

CIOL: How do you see the Indian mobile forensic market/industry shaping up?

DG: As the mobile phone industry continues to develop, there will always be a need for strong and highly reliable mobile forensic solutions. Over the years, mobile phones have become 'smarter', holding much more data than your average legacy phone. Data in smartphone devices include applications, emails, contacts, location information, GPS data, passwords, SMS messages, images, videos and much more.

As the sophistication of these devices increases, so does the need for highly reliable mobile forensic tools. These tools, Cellebrite's UFED Series, can extract, decode, analyse and report vital information in a forensically sound manner. This means that the information can be used as court worthy evidence and help in painting the bigger picture of any investigation.

CIOL: According to you what are the trends in mobile data transfer technologies and your offerings in this arena?

DG: Cellebrite's Transfer, Backup and Restore offering enables purchasers of new smartphones to transfer all their personal content (SMS, multimedia, contacts, calendar entries, emails etc) from their old phone within minutes, saving them the inconvenience of having to do it manually themselves.

We see demand for this offering growing as mobile phone owners migrate initially from legacy phones to smartphones, and then to more sophisticated smartphones as they reach the market.

According to the latest information we have available (from IDC, Gartner, Canalys and others) 30 percent of the world's mobile users live in India and China. Subscriber numbers in either country dwarf the number of subscribers in the USA (third place).

At the end of 2012, it was estimated that there were 906 million mobile subscribers in India, which accounted for 73.1 per cent of the population. China is now the top market for smartphone sales, but growth is expected to be strongest in India, followed by Indonesia, Russia and Brazil. IDC expects India and Brazil to catch up and overtake the UK (currently the world's third largest smartphone market) by 2016.