In this paper, we discuss our proposed method to acquire privacy-protected data from Symbian smartphones running the latest OS version 9.4, S60 5th Edition, and smartphones running the prior OS version 9.3, S60 3rd Edition. We then present our reverse-engineering analysis work on the active and deleted Short Message Service (SMS) message recovery from the on-phone memory in the Symbian smartphones. We describe the encoding and format of the raw data of the SMS messages so as to achieve an automated parsing and recovery of the messages. Our experiments on various sent, received, draft and deleted messages showed that we were able to recover both the active (in its entirety) and deleted SMS messages (partially) correctly and automatically.
['Vrizlynn L. L. Thing', 'Darell J. J. Tan']
Symbian smartphone forensics and security: recovery of privacy-protected deleted data