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

Summary

In this chapter, we learned all about how iOS stores emails and messages on the device and what artifacts an investigator can expect to find.

First, we introduced the Apple Mail application and discovered where emails are stored. We analyzed the relevant SQLite databases to extract email metadata and learned how to parse through EML files to view the email's body.

Later in the chapter, we focused on messaging forensics by looking at how iOS stores SMS and iMessage data on the sms.db database and how a SQL query can be used to extract all messages and their metadata. Then, we introduced the topic of third-party messaging applications and focused on three of them: WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal. We learned what data can be extracted from these apps and which are the most relevant SQL databases.

Finally, in the last section of this chapter, we discussed different options to attempt the recovery of deleted messages, such as using an open source tool called Mirf, which...