Android User Enabled Security

Many people own Android mobile phones. Various sources indicate that Android mobile has exceeded iOS (Apple iPhone) in overall world sales for a few years. A user enabled security such as the pattern lock may be a stumbling block when it comes to forensically examining the device. There are other forms of security for Androids, each potentially causing the same issue, preventing forensic tools from reading the stored user data. The gesture pattern, however, is still largely, one of the most popular enabled security measures set by the user. Tools that can bypass the gesture pattern, and in turn decode the acquisition, often utilize built-in scripts to construct the pattern in an easy format for the examiner to understand. Having a basic understanding of how the gesture pattern is stored, and how it could be manually decoded, can assist in validation, testimony, and overall understanding of the automated parsing of this value.