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 EXIF metadata

The Photos.sqlite database can be a huge source of metadata, but there may be some occasions in which the database is not available, and the investigator only has access to the media file. Thankfully, images and videos often contain embedded metadata, which is known as Exchangeable Image File Format (EXIF).

EXIF metadata can provide a wealth of information to investigators, such as the following:

  • The device model
  • Camera settings
  • Exposure and lens specifications
  • Timestamps
  • Location data
  • Altitude and bearing
  • Speed reference

When a photo or video is captured through an iOS device's built-in camera, EXIF metadata is automatically added to the media asset. The following screenshot shows the amount of metadata that can be extracted from a photo that was taken on an iPhone SE:

Figure 9.6 – EXIF metadata extracted from a photo that was captured on an iPhone

As you can see, by analyzing...