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

Chapter 9: Photo, Video, and Audio Forensics

In the first few chapters of the book, we focused on the identification and analysis of mobile evidence stored in system-generated artifacts such as databases, PLISTs, and log files. However, any type of investigation will also typically involve analyzing user-generated content found on a device, such as media files.

A modern iOS device can contain tens of thousands of media files, and each of these files is associated with unique metadata that can be critical to an investigation. In this chapter, we will learn how to identify and analyze multimedia content such as photos, videos, and audio files.

We will start the chapter with an introduction to media forensics and discuss where photos, videos, and audio recordings are stored on an iOS device. Then, we'll learn all about analyzing media metadata to gain meaningful insights, both from the file itself and from the corresponding databases. In the last part of the chapter, we will...