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

Chapter 12: Writing a Forensic Report and Building a Timeline

So far, it has been a journey of testing, acquiring, analyzing, and researching artifacts from iOS devices. We have worked on different methodologies and techniques for extracting data from a device, and we have learned how to analyze this data to highlight the evidence. In this final chapter, we will talk about the best practices and industry standards for writing a mobile forensic report.

We will start the chapter by learning how a report should be structured, what should be included, and how evidence should be reported in an impartial manner. Then, we will learn how to automatically generate a report using forensic software. In the final part of this chapter, we will discuss timelines, which have become the backbone of digital forensic analysis in both the public and private sectors, as they help explain what was happening on a given device during an incident or a crime. We will learn how to generate a timeline using...