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

Analyzing user viewing activity

So far, we have focused on analyzing photo and video media assets; however, the investigator may want to understand not only what media was stored on a device but also what media the user viewed.

This may include any of the following:

  • Audio/video streamed through Safari or other browsers
  • Music played through Apple Music or third-party apps such as Spotify
  • Videos played through third-party apps such as YouTube and Netflix

The KnowledgeC.db database, which we discussed in Chapter 5, Pattern-of-Life Forensics, tracks most of the user's day-to-day activity, including events related to audio or video playback.

The table of interest is the ZOBJECT table, which stores device events, organizing them by stream name. Every time iOS detects that the user has initiated media playback, a /media/nowPlaying event is triggered.

The following screenshot shows some example data from the KnowledgeC.db database, analyzed using DB Browser...