Mobile devices are often the richest source of evidence in an investigation, and Cellebrite is one of the most widely used tools for extracting their contents. But a raw Cellebrite extraction is not a finished case file — it's a dense XML report bundled with thousands of media files. Evidence Locker turns that bundle into a structured, searchable, reviewable case.
What's inside a Cellebrite export
A typical Cellebrite UFDR or XML export contains:
- A report file describing the device, the extraction method, and every artifact recovered.
- Structured records — chats, SMS/MMS, call logs, contacts, calendar entries, locations, and app data.
- A media folder holding the photos, videos, audio, and documents the records reference.
The records and the media are linked by internal identifiers. Processed by hand, reconciling them is slow and error-prone. That's exactly the work Evidence Locker automates.
How Evidence Locker processes the export
When you upload a Cellebrite zip, the acquisitions service:
- Validates and unpacks the archive, confirming the report and media are intact.
- Parses the XML into normalized records — conversations, participants, timestamps, and attachments.
- Re-links media to the records that reference them, so a message and its attached photo stay together.
- Hashes every artifact so the data carries an integrity fingerprint from the moment it enters the platform.
- Indexes everything for full-text search across messages, contacts, and metadata.
The result is a case you can actually work: threaded conversations, attached media inline, and a search box that reaches every word.
Reviewing the data
Once processing completes, an examiner can:
- Read conversations in chronological, threaded view rather than scrolling raw XML.
- Search across all communications for names, numbers, keywords, or dates.
- Tag and annotate messages of interest for later reporting.
- Preserve the original extraction untouched while working from indexed copies.
Forensic integrity throughout
Automation never comes at the expense of defensibility. The original upload is preserved exactly as received, every artifact is hashed, and every action an examiner takes is written to the case audit trail. When it's time to report, you can show not only what was found but how it was handled at every step.
Mobile evidence is only as useful as your ability to make sense of it. By turning a Cellebrite export into a structured, searchable, integrity-checked case, Evidence Locker lets examiners spend their time on analysis instead of file wrangling.