Book Image

iOS Forensics for Investigators

By : Gianluca Tiepolo
5 (1)
Book Image

iOS Forensics for Investigators

5 (1)
By: Gianluca Tiepolo

Overview of this book

Professionals working in the mobile forensics industry will be able to put their knowledge to work with this practical guide to learning how to extract and analyze all available data from an iOS device. This book is a comprehensive, how-to guide that leads investigators through the process of collecting mobile devices and preserving, extracting, and analyzing data, as well as building a report. Complete with step-by-step explanations of essential concepts, practical examples, and self-assessment questions, this book starts by covering the fundamentals of mobile forensics and how to overcome challenges in extracting data from iOS devices. Once you've walked through the basics of iOS, you’ll learn how to use commercial tools to extract and process data and manually search for artifacts stored in database files. Next, you'll find out the correct workflows for handling iOS devices and understand how to extract valuable information to track device usage. You’ll also get to grips with analyzing key artifacts, such as browser history, the pattern of life data, location data, and social network forensics. By the end of this book, you'll be able to establish a proper workflow for handling iOS devices, extracting all available data, and analyzing it to gather precious insights that can be reported as prosecutable evidence.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1 – Data Acquisition from iOS Devices
4
Section 2 – iOS Data Analysis
14
Section 3 – Reporting

Introducing email forensics

In the first part of this chapter, we will introduce email forensics and we will focus on the Apple Mail application. It's safe to say that Apple Mail is certainly the most popular email client on iOS devices; however, investigators should keep in mind that there are many more third-party email apps available, such as Outlook, Spark, Gmail, and Airmail. Analyzing third-party apps is covered in Chapter 10, Analyzing Third-Party Apps. A comprehensive forensic analysis of email artifacts should entail analyzing Apple Mail and any third-party clients that have been installed on the device.

The first step in investigating Apple Mail data is locating the artifacts: these can be found in the folder located at /private/var/mobile/Library/Mail. Please note that a full filesystem extraction is required. The following is a list of the most relevant files and their description:

  • For each email account configured on the device, there will be a corresponding...