Book Image

Practical Mobile Forensics - Third Edition

By : Rohit Tamma, Oleg Skulkin, Heather Mahalik, Satish Bommisetty
Book Image

Practical Mobile Forensics - Third Edition

By: Rohit Tamma, Oleg Skulkin, Heather Mahalik, Satish Bommisetty

Overview of this book

Covering up-to-date mobile platforms, this book will focuses on teaching you the most recent techniques for investigating mobile devices. We delve mobile forensics techniques in iOS 9-11, Android 7-8 devices, and Windows 10. We will demonstrate the latest open source and commercial mobile forensics tools, enabling you to analyze and retrieve data effectively. You will learn how to introspect and retrieve data from the cloud, and document and prepare reports of your investigations. By the end of this book, you will have mastered the current operating systems and the relevant techniques to recover data from mobile devices by leveraging open source solutions.

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Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Contributors
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Introduction to Mobile Forensics
Introduction to Mobile Forensics
Why do we need mobile forensics?
Mobile forensics
The mobile phone evidence extraction process
Practical mobile forensic approaches
Potential evidence stored on mobile phones
Examination and analysis
Rules of evidence
Good forensic practices
Summary
2
Understanding the Internals of iOS Devices
Understanding the Internals of iOS Devices
iPhone models
iPhone hardware
iPad models
Understanding the iPad hardware
Apple Watch models
Understanding the Apple Watch hardware
The filesystem
The HFS Plus filesystem
The APFS filesystem
Disk layout
iPhone operating system
Summary
3
Data Acquisition from iOS Devices
Data Acquisition from iOS Devices
Operating modes of iOS devices
Logical acquisition
Filesystem acquisition
Physical acquisition
Summary
4
Data Acquisition from iOS Backups
Data Acquisition from iOS Backups
iTunes backup
Extracting unencrypted backups
Encrypted backup
Working with iCloud backups
Summary
5
iOS Data Analysis and Recovery
iOS Data Analysis and Recovery
Timestamps
Summary
6
iOS Forensic Tools
iOS Forensic Tools
Working with Cellebrite UFED Physical Analyzer
Working with Magnet AXIOM
Working with Belkasoft Evidence Center
Working with Oxygen Forensic Detective
Summary
7
Understanding Android
Understanding Android
The evolution of Android
The Android model
Android security
The Android file hierarchy
The Android file system
Summary
8
Android Forensic Setup and Pre-Data Extraction Techniques
Android Forensic Setup and Pre-Data Extraction Techniques
Setting up the forensic environment for Android
Screen lock bypassing techniques
Gaining root access
Summary
9
Android Data Extraction Techniques
Android Data Extraction Techniques
Data extraction techniques
Summary
10
Android Data Analysis and Recovery
Android Data Analysis and Recovery
Analyzing an Android image
Android data recovery
Summary
11
Android App Analysis, Malware, and Reverse Engineering
Android App Analysis, Malware, and Reverse Engineering
Analyzing Android apps
Reverse engineering Android apps
Android malware
Summary
12
Windows Phone Forensics
Windows Phone Forensics
Windows Phone OS
Security model
Windows Phone filesystem
Data acquisition
Commercial forensic tool acquisition methods
Key artifacts for examination
Summary
13
Parsing Third-Party Application Files
Parsing Third-Party Application Files
Third-party application overview
Encoding versus encryption
Application data storage
Forensic methods used to extract third-party application data
Summary
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Extracting unencrypted backups

There are many free and commercial tools available to analyze data from unencrypted backups. These tools analyze the manifest.db database, restore the filenames, and create the file structure that users see on the iOS device. Some popular tools include the iBackup Viewer, iExplorer, and commercial tools such as BlackLight, AXIOM, Physical Analyzer, and more.

iBackup Viewer

iBackup Viewer is a free tool for both Windows and macOS, which can be downloaded from http://www.imactools.com/iphonebackupviewer/.

The tool expects the backup to be located in the default location, but you can change it to the location of your choice, for example, an external drive.

To extract the backup, follow these steps:

  1. If the backup you want to analyze is not saved in the default location, click on the Preferences hyperlink on the main screen, and choose the right location:

Choosing the backup location

  1. You will see the backups available in the location you chose. Click on the one you want...
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