Dissecting the Android WiFiConfigStore.xml for forensic analysis
A smartphone is often connected to a Wi-Fi network: think of how much time we spend at home, in our office, or even in a public place while studying or exercising. As soon as we can reach a (hopefully trusted) Wi-Fi network, we connect to it! On Android devices, the Wi-Fi connection is managed by the Wi-Fi service. This service must store information about the previously connected Wi-Fi networks so that the phone can reconnect as soon as it's in the vicinity. The file that stores this information is WiFiConfigStore.xml, a simple XML file stored in the Userdata partition under /data/misc/apexdata/com.android.wifi/. The source code describing the contents of this file is available on the Android source code website . This file is parsed by most commercial and open-source tools. I wanted to go a little more in-depth to take a look at the different Wi-Fi settings. The main XML tag is <WifiConfigStoreData > . This tag contains the Version sub-tag, which contains...