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 iOS applications

In Chapter 1, Introducing iOS Forensics, we learned where iOS applications are stored and how their data is structured into containers. We're going to build on that knowledge to learn how to get a list of all the apps that are stored on a device and how to locate the data container, which is where most of the artifacts are stored.

Every time an application is installed on a device, iOS generates a global unique identifier (GUID) that uniquely represents the application. This GUID is also used in the path to the application's containers:

  • The application bundle container, which stores the app itself, is located at /private/var/containers/Bundle/Application/<app-GUID>/.
  • The application data container is located at /private/var/mobile/Containers/Data/Application/<app-GUID>/.

In this chapter, we're going to focus on data containers, which typically have the following directory structure:

...