Pull, Analyze, Repeat

The first step that I had to perform to do my research is to root the device, to do this I used a tutorial that I found here. It details the process to give root access to the device and install the Super User app.  This process was pretty straight forward using that tutorial, however I did have some problems getting the correct drivers for the device to be able to communicate with the Android Debug Bridge (ADB). I solved this problem by re-installing the standard drivers for the Nexus 7 and going through the tutorial again to get it to work. When I was finished with this I could then use the Super User app to give super user access to the Android Debug Bridge.  The final result of being able to do this gave me access to all of the files that are on the device. The final product of rooting the device is shown below.

During my research I have been using the Android Debug Bridge to obtain data from the Nexus 7 that I have been using. At first I was having difficulties pulling data from the device because I was attempting to pull the data directly from the /data/data folder even though I had sufficient permissions to access the folder I did not have permissions to take data directly from the folder so first I had to use ADB shell to be in the command prompt inside of the device.

 Using the su command I could copy the data from the /data/data folder to the sdcard which I had unrestricted access to.

After I had copied the data to the sdcard I could then pull the data to my hard drive using the command

this command puts the data from the device onto the C: drive of my computer where I can then analyze the data.  The data that I am most interested in is contained within 4 folders.

The highlighted folders are for the Dropbox application and for the Google Drive application

The highlighted folders are for the Skydrive application and the Ubuntu One Files application.

Each of these folders include multiple sub-folders where the data is contained.  The majority of the data that I looked into is in the form of sqlite databases.  These sqlite databases contained user identification information as well as time stamps when the files were uploaded.  Google Drive was the only app that contained data that proved which user uploaded a certain file the rest of them just showed the folder without any usernames associated with the file that was uploaded.

The other files that were pulled from the device were .xml files which show the user preferences for the account. From this I was able to obtain the user identification for Google Drive, however for the others I could only obtain either the amount of storage for the specified account or the sharing settings depending on the application.