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 iCloud forensics

In October 2011, Apple introduced iCloud, a cloud-based platform that allows users to store and share files between their devices, and backup their data. iCloud is integrated directly into iOS and is accessible from Windows machines, macOS computers, or directly from the web by browsing to https://www.icloud.com.

From a forensic viewpoint, cloud forensics is arguably the future of mobile forensics as it allows investigators to access data that may not even be stored on the device itself. As the majority of new devices do not (yet) support jailbreaks and full filesystem acquisitions, performing a cloud acquisition is a great alternative.

Before we dive deep into the technical details of extracting data from iCloud, it's important to understand exactly what kind of data we can expect to find, starting with iCloud backups.

iCloud backups

Since the release of iOS 5 in 2011, Apple allows users to back up their devices automatically to their...