Analyzing a full physical image
Once an image has been obtained using one of the discussed methods, an examiner could conceivably go through the image manually and extract each partition, but would probably prefer to avoid doing that. Luckily, there is a wide variety of mobile forensic tools that can ingest a physical image, such as Cellebrite, XRY, Mobile Phone Examiner, and many others. Unfortunately, none of these are free or open source. By far the most popular analysis tool that is free and open source is Autopsy by Brian Carrier.
Autopsy
The Sleuth Kit began as a set of Linux-based command line tools for forensics; eventually, a browser-based GUI named Autopsy was added. Recently, Autopsy has been released as a stand-alone platform on Windows, and includes support for analyzing Android images. Version 3.1.1 is shown in the following screenshots. The full process for loading and analyzing an image will be covered in Chapter 8, Forensic Analysis of Android Applications.
Autopsy can be...