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

Practical third-party applications forensics

In this section, we're going to look at some of the most popular iOS third-party applications and their artifacts. The purpose of this section is not to take an in-depth look at each application, but rather to give you a practical reference of what artifacts can be expected for each app, as well as where they're located.

It's important to understand that the names and paths of artifacts are subject to change, and each update may change the way an application interfaces with iOS.

Applications are grouped into four categories: social networking, messaging, productivity, and multimedia.

For each application, the path to the artifact is provided, along with a description. Keep in mind that all the paths are relative to the application's data container or group container.

Social networking applications

In this section, we will focus on the three primary social networking applications, Facebook, Instagram, and...