ACELab PC-3000 Mobile

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A Versatile Approach to Data Recovery from Mobile Devices

The concept of the PC-3000 Mobile is changing. Now two products are available: PC-3000 Mobile Basic and PC-3000 Mobile PRO.

Product Code: AP-ACE-PC3000-MOBILE-BASIC

Product Code: AP-ACE-PC3000-MOBILE-PRO
PC-3000 Mobile PRO does not replace UFED, XRY, Oxygen or any other available tool. PC-3000 Mobile PRO complements these products, adding new possibilities to get access to phone when it is physically unaccessible

Today, we cannot imagine our lives without portable devices. New models pop up every day: we use them to communicate, to study, to work. But so do the criminals! The complexity of modern mobile devices may bring you an unaccounted number of challenges during evidence recovery. That is why it is so important to have at your disposal every forensic data recovery tool that can help you with the investigations!

How many tools do you need to recover data from smartphones and other types of mobile devices?

Those who deal with mobile phone recovery know that they lack an all-embracing tool that can cover all stages of getting data from these devices.

If a smartphone is not locked, works properly and is accessible through the standard interface, you can use the available commercial and free software products to get data from it.
But how often do you deal with such cases in practice?
In real life, a mobile device is often damaged, locked or totally non-functional. That’s why today data recovery engineers have to spend a lot of money on various specific purpose-built adapters and programmers if they want to recover different mobile devices. But what they get are uncoordinated solutions which are very limited in their functionality.

Until now the market hasn’t offered any single solution with the capability to:

  • Unify the whole range of hardware methods to access data both on healthy devices and on damaged/locked devices.
  • Analyze and recover data from various file systems within its own efficient platform.
  • Possess broad analytical functionality.
  • Recover data from the widest range of smartphones and other mobile devices for digital forensics and other purposes.

ACE Labs has developed the world’s only universal solution to deal with all these tasks in one tool!

PC-3000 MOBILE hardware platform is based on three main methods of getting access to data from mobile devices:

  1. Ability to operate via the standard interface of a mobile device belonging to any mobile platform. The controller of PС-3000 MOBILE has 3 built-in USB 3.0 ports featuring independent power control and error control. At the moment Android OS devices are supported by PC-3000 MOBILE through a special driver (x86, x64) created by ACE Lab. If a smartphone is not physically damaged, a common cable connection through a standard phone interface allows getting access to user data on a smartphone. Right now ACE Lab developers are conducting research on supporting Windows 10, Windows Mobile and Apple iOS-based devices.
  2. For partially damaged devices: ability to operate via the factory contacts of a mobile device’s PCB using the JTAG/eMMC/FBUS/UART protocols as individual or combined access methods.
  3. Widely functional chip-off method for physically damaged mobile devices, when it is impossible to get access to data content through the standard interface or JTAG. This method includes the following features:
    • Direct reading mode for eMMC/eMCP chips implemented through 2 internal independent SD/MMC COMBO ports supporting the SD 3.0/MMC4.41 protocols (up to 150 Mb/s). A specialized kernel and proprietary design of the SD/MMC interface allow to reach high data transfer rates for “healthy” chips and ensure reading in a factory mode for damaged ones;
    • Ability to operate via the NAND interface using the factory contacts of eMMC/eMCP chips, if the chips are unable to function through the standard interface or respond too slowly;
    • Wide support of the eMMC 153/169, eMCP 162/186, eMCP 221, and eMCP 529 chips manufactured in 9х11, 10х11, 11.5х13, 12х16, 12х18 or 14х18 packages. To support such a broad range of form factors, PC-3000 MOBILE kit includes 2 universal adapters with a set of inserts.

PC-3000 MOBILE is based on the results of R&D work carried out at ACE Lab for many years and already proven as highly efficient for data recovery from damaged solid-state drives.

These technologies include the ReadRetry reading modes, software and hardware retry procedures, voltage selection methods, and factory modes for accessing the data.

Besides, PC-3000 MOBILE has the extension ports for device-specific functionality and connection of add-on modules where voltage for all ports is supplied through an internal controllable power supply unit.

When developing PC-3000 MOBILE, ACE Lab pays serious attention to the software part of the new system. After saving data dump content, it is possible to do:

  • Deep analysis of file systems that supports a large list of file system types (FAT12/16/32, NTFS, Ext2/3/4, HFS+, exFAT, etc.) and ensures good results even in case of logical damage. In addition, PC-3000 MOBILE features its own methods of logical access to data at different stages of work (e.g., ADB Volumes) with the possibility to save results in forensic formats (AFF, E01, S01, RAW)
  • Parsing of standard content. User data can be extracted for presentation in the format which is familiar to any smartphone user and displayed in special viewing modes. PC-3000 MOBILE has a lot of modules for different content types (contacts, text messages, WhatsApp, Web, Wi-Fi, etc.) as well as a set of analytic features and forensic tools.
  • Result export and output. PC-3000 MOBILE allows to export the extracted data as formatted reports, transport formats or directly to a file.

PC-3000 MOBILE supports Windows XP – Windows 10 (x86/x64) operating systems and allows both loading external dumps and exporting its own.

PC-3000 Mobile Basic

Product Code: AP-ACE-PC3000-MOBILE-BASIC

The PC-3000 Mobile Basic allows:
• Direct access to EMMC (using the chip off method and a special adapter)
• Full image access to smartphones via the MTP and ADB protocol (rooting is required)
• Low-level access to non-encrypted phones (Android 6 and below) via the USB cable on Qualcomm and MTK-based CPUs
• Basic content analysis and data parsing for extraction of SMS / WhatsApp / Contacts / Meda info.

Please Note: The PC-3000 Mobile Basic and the previous version of PC-3000 Mobile are not the same products.

The licenses for PC-3000 Mobile Basic and PC-3000 Mobile PRO are not limited in time.
Users can continue using them even without buying the Technical Support. However, if customers buy the Technical Support service, they will get new features and will be able to request to support the new phone models.

PC-3000 Mobile PRO

Product Code: AP-ACE-PC3000-MOBILE-PRO

The PC-3000 Mobile PRO allows:
• All the features included into the BASIC version
• Low level access to locked smartphones (the Android version doesn’t matter)
• Full access to the phone image even the dump is encrypted or the smartphone is locked
• 100% integrity of the analyzed EMMC on the smartphone
• Quick adding new smartphone models based on Qualcomm, Mediatek and Spreadtrum controllers upon customer requests

The PC-3000 Mobile PRO is the product which can be quickly tailored according to the customers’ needs.

If your customer has a mobile phone which is not indicated in the support list, the customer can make a request to ACE Lab, and we will add this model to the support within a couple of days.
The PC-3000 Mobile PRO supports three most popular mobile phone processors which cover a big part of the mobile phone market: Qualcomm, Mediatek and Spreadtrum
Adding new phone models can be fast because the processor which is in it is already in the support.