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

Acquiring locked devices

At the start of this book, in Chapter 1, Introducing iOS Forensics, we discussed the iOS operating system and learned how Apple achieves data protection by encrypting files stored on the device.

The device's passcode is an essential aspect of the encryption process, as it is used to generate the encryption key, which, in turn, is used to decrypt the data. Until the user enters the screen lock passcode, almost every piece of data remains inaccessible. Of course, there are some exceptions, as some files are required for the operating system to work and they need to be always accessible, even when the device is locked.

For these reasons, acquiring and analyzing a locked device is no easy task but there are a few options. When an investigator is tackling a locked device, the first step requires identifying the device and its current state, as the options available to attempt data acquisition will vary depending on a number of factors, such as the model...