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

Recovering deleted messages

One of the most common tasks in a mobile device investigation is to attempt the recovery of data that was deleted by the user, such as chats and messages, as these may contain invaluable evidence.

In this chapter, we learned that SMS messages and chats from third-party applications are all stored in SQLite databases; this means that the ability to recover deleted chats effectively depends on the possibility of recovering any records from the SQLite database.

In Chapter 4, Working with Common iOS Artifacts, we discussed several options for the recovery of deleted records, such as the following:

  • Parsing through the database using a hex viewer
  • String carving
  • Analyzing the Write Ahead Log (WAL) files
  • Using forensic tools such as FQLite to recover data from free blocks and unallocated space

All of these solutions can be effective in recovering deleted messages, but only if the database was not vacuumed after the records were purged...