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 third-party messaging apps

Third-party messaging applications allow users to keep in touch with their contacts, and share photos, videos, and audio messages. Many of these apps also allow users to send likes, emojis, animations, and any kind of attachment.

Most forensic tools do an excellent job at analyzing and parsing through these apps; however, the examiner should have a basic understanding of how these applications work, how they store their data, where they store it, and how to extract it. In this section, we'll focus on three of the most popular messaging apps: WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal:

  • With over 2 billion worldwide users, WhatsApp is definitely one of the most popular IM apps. From a forensic perspective, the app stores its data on the device, in unencrypted form. Chats and messages are not stored on WhatsApp's servers; however, if this feature is enabled, an encrypted backup can be stored on iCloud. Artifacts related to WhatsApp can be...