Book Image

Mastering Mobile Forensics

By : Soufiane Tahiri
Book Image

Mastering Mobile Forensics

By: Soufiane Tahiri

Overview of this book

Mobile forensics presents a real challenge to the forensic community due to the fast and unstoppable changes in technology. This book aims to provide the forensic community an in-depth insight into mobile forensic techniques when it comes to deal with recent smartphones operating systems Starting with a brief overview of forensic strategies and investigation procedures, you will understand the concepts of file carving, GPS analysis, and string analyzing. You will also see the difference between encryption, encoding, and hashing methods and get to grips with the fundamentals of reverse code engineering. Next, the book will walk you through the iOS, Android and Windows Phone architectures and filesystem, followed by showing you various forensic approaches and data gathering techniques. You will also explore advanced forensic techniques and find out how to deal with third-applications using case studies. The book will help you master data acquisition on Windows Phone 8. By the end of this book, you will be acquainted with best practices and the different models used in mobile forensics.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Mastering Mobile Forensics
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Preparing a Mobile Forensic Workstation
Index

The iOS filesystem


Just like all Apple operating systems, iOS is a derivative of the Mac OS X. Thus, iOS uses Hierarchical File System Plus (HFS+) as its primary filesystem. HFS+ replaces the first developed filesystem, HFS, and is considered an enhanced version of HFS. They are architecturally very similar. The main improvements seen in HFS+ are:

  • Decrease in disk space usage on large volumes (efficient use of disk space)

  • International-friendly file names (by the use of UNICODE instead of MacRoman)

  • Allows future systems to use and extend files/folders' metadata

HFS+ divides the total space on a volume (a file that contains data and structure to access this data) into allocation blocks and uses 32-bit fields to identify them, this means that this allows up to 2^32 blocks on a given volume which simply means that a volume can hold more files.

All HFS+ volumes follow a well-defined structure and each volume contains a volume header, a catalog file, extents overflow file, attributes file, allocation...