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

Dynamic application analysis

Third-party applications can be a huge source of evidential artifacts since most apps collect, store, and process a tremendous amount of data from their users. Unfortunately, investigators will most likely have to resort to manually analyzing these applications, as forensic tools cannot possibly support each update of every app. Even if a tool does support a certain application, a manual examination should still be carried out to validate the tool's results and to ensure that all the data was parsed correctly.

Often, before the examination can be performed, the examiner will have to do some research on the application of interest to understand how it works, what data it stores, and where it stores it. This entails using a research device to install the app and analyze it.

When analyzing mobile applications, there is no standard process that an investigator should take to examine the data since each application performs differently; in this chapter...