Smart cards are fundamental technology in modern life. It is embedded in numerous devices such as GPS devices, ATM cards, Mobile SIM cards and many others. Mobile devices became the evolution of technology. It becomes smaller, faster and supports large storage capabilities. Digital forensics of mobile devices that maybe found in crime scene is becoming inevitable. The purpose of this research is to address the SIM cards digital forensics analysis. It presents sound forensic methodology and process of SIM cards forensic examination. In particular, the main aim of the research is to answer the following research questions: (1) what forensic evidence could be extracted from a SIM card and (2) what are limitations that may hinder a forensic analysis?
TABLE OF CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
APPROVAL PAGE
DEDICATION
ACKNOWELDGEMENT
ABSTRACT
TABLE OF CONTENT
CHAPTER ONE
- INTRODUCTION
- BACKGROUND AND OVERVIEW OF THE STUDY
- AIM/OBJECTIVE OF THE PROJECT
- SCOPE OF THE PROJECT
CHAPTER TWO
LITERATURE REVIEW
2.0 LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1 REVIEW OF MOBILE DEVICE FORENSICS
2.2 HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF MOBILE DEVICE FORENSICS
2.3 OVERVIEW OF SUBSCRIBER IDENTITY MODULE (SIM)
2.4 HISTORICAL BACKGROUND AND PROCUREMENT OF SIM CARD
2.5 SIM CHIP STRUCTURE AND PACKAGING
2.6 FORMATS SIM CARDS
CHAPTER THREE
3.0 METHODOLOGY
3.1 SIM CARD FORENSIC ANALYSIS PROCESS FLOW
3.2 SIM COMMUNICATION
3.3 SIM FILE IDENTIFIER
3.4 DATA ACQUISITION
3.5 SMS FORENSICS
3.6 IM CARD FORENSICS PROOF-OF-CONCEPT
CHAPTER FOUR
4.1 FINDINGS AND LIMITATIONS
CHAPTER FIVE
- CONCLUSIONS
5.3 REFERENCES
CHAPTER ONE
1.0 INSTRODUCTION
Mobile forensics has become a rapidly important forensic domain, since mobile phones have become a common source of digital evidence. Nowadays, smart phones, tablets, and smart cards contains a large information storage with increasing capabilities [1] which provides an extensive source of information that could leverage forensic analysis and investigation.
Unfortunately, it’s a common knowledge that criminals don’t prefer using smart phones, because it can easily be tracked using different methods. As such, they may prefer to use prepaid phones known as “burner phone” or simple non-smart phones. Although, recent reports that Law Enforcement are confronted with criminals and terrorists that are increasingly using different smart phone models and Law Enforcement are facing difficulties decrypting digital evidence residual in those phone without the phone manufacturing support. This doesn’t mean that forensic analysis of non-smart phone is an obsolete domain. In fact, SIM cards forensic is a fundamental activity in any mobile phone forensics, and law Enforcement are regularly in a situation where it is required to extract basic information from a phone SIM card.
The existing techniques, methods, software (including commercial or open source) in mobile phone forensics are focusing on the analysis of smart phones. For example, extracting artifacts of applications installed on the mobile operating system, i.e. Android or IOS; however very limited research addressing the forensic analysis of Mobile phone hardware or SIM card. In particular, SIM card forensics is disclosed forensic area, and currently limited to a set of commercial applications that could extract limited forensic artifacts. SIM cards are the gateway between the mobile phones and the network, they store information that could be used for reconstructing user’s activities, such as phonebook, incoming and/or outgoing calls, sent and/or received messages, message’s timestamps, when the user power off or on his/her device, etc.
The main aim of the proposed research is to address the digital forensics aspects of SIM cards and providing open source library to support extracting sound forensic evidence from a SIM card. More importantly, the research attempt to answer the following questions: (1) what information could be stored in SIM cards, (2) what can be extracted and/or recovered to assist a forensic investigation, (3) and limitation of SIM cards forensic analysis.
The paper begins with a brief introduction about Smart phone forensics, Smart cards and SIM cards, in section Two. Section Three describes the forensic analysis methodology of SIM cards. Section Four addresses the methods and protocols that would enable communication with SIM cards and the SIM card’s file system structure. In section Five, the method to forensically acquire SIM cards is presented, and section Six presents the SMS forensic analysis methods.
In section Seven, a Proof-of-Concept implementation for extraction of forensic evidence from SIM cards is introduced, and sample experiments on different SIM cards models are presented. Finally, the last section presents the research conclusion, limitations and draws the future work. In summary, the research contributions are the following:
- Review of SIM card structure and required development environment.
- Review of SIM card file system, identifiers types and structure.
- Listing of communication methods with a SIM card.
- Forensic method that allows extracting of digital evidence from a SIM card.
- A proof of concept implementation for the proposed forensic methodology.
- Forensic timeline analysis recovered messages from SIM card.
1.2 OVERVIEW AND BACKGROUNDS
SIM cards analysis is not a new research, however, it’s a disclosed research and very limited information about it are publicly available. The earliest SIM cards forensic analysis research is presented in [2] where the SIM file system structure and data residual in a SIM card were briefly discussed. Other published research proposed set of forensics tools such as [3], [4] and presented in [5]. However, those tools only focused on extracting the basic information from a SIM card and didn’t provide clear description about the forensic techniques used to extract evidence from the SIM card.
Moreover, the current available public forensic tools for SIM card analysis are not updated, and some of those tools are depending on the presence of specific currently unsupported hardware such as SIM readers compliant to PC/SC specification. Because of those limitations, this research aims to provide an updated implementation that support extraction of digital evidence from modern SIM card models. Also, the proposed implementation is hardware agnostic and it communicates with a SIM card using the standard communication protocol. This will allows forensic researchers and/or Law Enforcement to use and extend the proposed research without having relied on a specific SIM hardware readers.
1.3 OBJECTIVE OF THE STUDY
The main aim of the proposed research is to analysed the digital forensics aspects of SIM cards and providing open source library to support extracting sound forensic evidence from a SIM card. More importantly, the research attempt to answer the following questions: (1) what information could be stored in SIM cards, (2) what can be extracted and/or recovered to assist a forensic investigation, (3) and limitation of SIM cards forensic analysis.
1.4 SCOPE OF THE STUDY
The chip that is generally referred to, as a SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) card is in fact, a UICC, i.e., Universal Integrated Circuit Card, which is a smart card that helps devices like, mobile phones, Set Top Boxes, etc., connect to its nearest cellular radio network tower for communication purposes. Instead of referring these smart cards as UICC, they are commonly referred to as SIM cards in day to day usage SIM card Forensics is an essential section of Mobile device forensics. The information that a SIM card can provide the forensic examiner can be crucial to an investigation. Obtaining a SIM card permits a plethora of information, which the suspect has dealt with over the phone to be investigated.
REFERENCES
[1] I. M. Baggili, R. Mislan, and M. Rogers, “Mobile phone forensics tool testing: A database driven approach,”
International Journal of Digital Evidence, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 168–178, 2007.
[2] W. Jansen and R. Ayers, “Forensic software tools for cell phone subscriber identity modules,” in Proceedings of the Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law, 2006, pp. 93–106.
[3] R. Thakur, K. Chourasia, and B. Singh, “Cellular phone forensics,” International Journal of Scientific and Research Publications, vol. 2, no. 8, 2012.
[4] W. Jansen, A. Delaitre, et al., “Reference material for assessing forensic sim tools,” in Security Technology, 2007 41st Annual IEEE International Carnahan Conference on. IEEE, 2007, pp. 227–234.
[5] F. Casadei, A. Savoldi, and P. Gubian, “Forensics and sim cards: an overview,” International Journal of Digital Evidence, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 1–21, 2006.
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