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 iTunes backups

Investigating a device that is locked by an unknown passcode can quickly bring an investigation to a halt if the iPhone in question is one of the newer models, such as the iPhone 13 or the iPhone 12; however, if the suspect has backed up their device to their desktop or laptop and the investigator has access to this machine, the backup can easily be recovered, extracted, and analyzed.

Another reason why examining backups may be beneficial is that the user may have deleted some data from their mobile device, but that doesn't delete the data that resides within the backup: it's quite common, in fact, that backup files contain data that the user believes no longer exists.

Local backups, also called iTunes backups, are essentially a logical acquisition of the device and typically contain contacts, SMS messages, media files, logs, databases, keychains, preferences, configurations, browsing artifacts, and location data, for example. A backup can...