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

Understanding backups - local, cloud, encrypted and unencrypted


Apple offers its users the choice of three different backup methods, allowing to be created, plain and password-protected local backups via iTunes, or making over-the-air iCloud backups. The following table plots major differences between the three types of backups:

iTunes, plain (unencrypted)

iTunes password-protected (encrypted)

iCloud

Keychain encrypted with

securityd (*)

Password (same as the rest of the backup); some keychain items with a higher protection class are still protected with hardware-backed securityd key

securityd (*)

Amount of data

Full (but keychain data may remain inaccessible unless securityd is extracted out of the physical device)

Limited (some keychain data unavailable)

Limited (for example, no IMEI and other hardware-specific data)

Type of recovery

Most information available instantly

Must recover original password

Must know Apple ID/password, or must have non-expired authentication token...