Earlier I pointed out DFRWS2015 conference:
https://firmwaresecurity.com/2015/08/09/new-android-firmware-research-at-dfrws-next-week/
Well, presentations of most are online now:
http://www.dfrws.org/2015/program.shtml
Amongst many interesting forensic presentations, one firmware-centric one that caught my eye was:
“New acquisition method based on firmware update protocols for Android smartphones”
Seung Jei Yang, Jung Ho Choi, Ki Bom Kim and Tae Joo Chang
Android remains the dominant OS in the smartphone market even though the iOS share of the market increased during the iPhone 6 release period. As various types of Android smartphones are being launched in the market, forensic studies are being conducted to test data acquisition and analysis. However, since the application of new Android security technologies, it has become more difficult to acquire data using existing forensic methods. In order to address this problem, we propose a new acquisition method based on analyzing the firmware update protocols of Android smartphones. A physical acquisition of Android smartphones can be achieved using the flash memory read command by reverse engineering the firmware update protocol in the bootloader. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is superior to existing forensic methods in terms of the integrity guarantee, acquisition speed, and physical dump with screen-locked smart-phones (USB debugging disabled).
Click to access DFRWS2015-8.pdf
Firmware Security 