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

Physical acquisition


iOS devices have two types of memory—volatile (RAM) and non-volatile (NAND Flash). RAM is used to load and execute the key parts of the operating system or the application. The data stored in the RAM is lost after a device reboots. RAM usually contains very important application information, such as active applications, usernames, passwords, and encryption keys. Though the information stored in the RAM can be crucial in an investigation, currently there is no easy method or tool available to acquire the RAM memory from a live iPhone.

Unlike RAM, NAND is non-volatile memory and retains the data stored in it even after a device reboots. NAND flash is the main storage area, and contains the system files and user data (http://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/SpecialPublications/NIST.SP.800-101r1.pdf). This document, written by NIST, not only covers memory storage in mobile devices, but mobile device forensic practices in general.

The goal of physical acquisition is to perform a bit...