Book Image

Mobile Forensics ??? Advanced Investigative Strategies

By : Oleg Afonin, Vladimir Katalov
Book Image

Mobile Forensics ??? Advanced Investigative Strategies

By: Oleg Afonin, Vladimir Katalov

Overview of this book

Investigating digital media is impossible without forensic tools. Dealing with complex forensic problems requires the use of dedicated tools, and even more importantly, the right strategies. In this book, you’ll learn strategies and methods to deal with information stored on smartphones and tablets and see how to put the right tools to work. We begin by helping you understand the concept of mobile devices as a source of valuable evidence. Throughout this book, you will explore strategies and "plays" and decide when to use each technique. We cover important techniques such as seizing techniques to shield the device, and acquisition techniques including physical acquisition (via a USB connection), logical acquisition via data backups, over-the-air acquisition. We also explore cloud analysis, evidence discovery and data analysis, tools for mobile forensics, and tools to help you discover and analyze evidence. By the end of the book, you will have a better understanding of the tools and methods used to deal with the challenges of acquiring, preserving, and extracting evidence stored on smartphones, tablets, and the cloud.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Mobile Forensics – Advanced Investigative Strategies
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Breaking backup passwords


If you encounter a password-protected backup, you'll need to recover (or break) the original password in order to decrypt its content. There is no way around the password. Apple's backup encryption is pretty strong by today's standards, which makes it easier to attack the original password rather than attacking the binary encryption key. The password can only be recovered via the usual means (brute force and dictionary or hybrid attacks).

In order to break the password, we'll use in-house Elcomsoft Phone Breaker (formerly Phone Password Breaker). This tool was originally designed to do exactly that: breaking iOS backup passwords. Elcomsoft Phone Breaker will attempt to guess the password by performing several kinds of attacks. How much time it will need to recover the password, and whether or not it'll be able to recover the password at all, depends on how strong the original password was. Short, simple passwords (for example, 4-digit PIN) can be broken extremely...