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.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
5
iOS Data Analysis and Recovery

The HFS Plus filesystem


In 1996, Apple developed a new filesystem, Hierarchical File System (HFS), to accommodate the storage of large datasets. In a HFS filesystem, the storage medium is represented as volumes. HFS volumes are divided into logical blocks of 512 bytes. The logical blocks are numbered from first to last on a given volume and will remain static with the same size as physical blocks, that is, 512 bytes. These logical blocks are grouped together into allocation blocks, which are used by the HFS filesystem to track data in a more efficient way. HFS uses a 16-bit value to address allocation blocks, which limits the number of allocation blocks to 65,535. To overcome the inefficient allocations of disk space and some of the limitations of HFS, Apple introduced the HFS Plus filesystem (http://dubeiko.com/development/FileSystems/HFSPLUS/tn1150.html).

The HFS Plus filesystem was designed to support larger file sizes. HFS volumes are divided into sectors that are usually 512 bytes in...