FROST: Forensic Recovery of Scrambled Telephones

Abstract

At the end of 2011, Google released version 4.0 of its Android operating system for smartphones. For the first time, Android smartphone owners were supplied with a disk encryption feature that transparently encrypts user partitions. On the downside, encrypted smartphones are a nightmare for IT forensics and law enforcement, because brute force appears to be the only option to recover encrypted data by technical means. However, RAM contents are necessarily left unencrypted and, as we show, they can be acquired from live systems with physical access only. To this end, we present the data recovery tool Frost (Forensic Recovery of Scrambled Telephones). Using Galaxy Nexus devices from Samsung as an example, we show that it is possible to perform cold boot attacks against Android smartphones and to retrieve valuable information from RAM. This information includes personal messages, photos, passwords and the encryption key. Since smartphones get switched off only seldom, and since the tools that we provide must not be installed before the attack, our method can be applied in real cases. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.