Data reverse engineering on a smartphone

In this paper we propose a novel methodology which applies data reverse engineering on a smartphone, which aims at helping the operator to identify in which files the personal information are contained and how to decode them, in order to be converted in a more suitable format. The proposed methodology shows its full potential when applied to mobile operating systems for which data formats are not open or not public. The work in this paper follows the MIAT (Mobile Internal Acquisition Tool) open source tool to support investigation from the data acquisition to the data analysis, but the decoded information can be used to serve other areas beyond mobile forensics.