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 2: Data Acquisition from iOS Devices

Mobile devices present a unique set of challenges compared to desktop computers when approaching the data acquisition phase. While in the world of desktop computers there is a consolidated workflow that allows an investigator to carry out a so-called forensically sound acquisition, when we're dealing with mobile devices there is no single, one-size-fits-all procedure that can be adapted to each and every device. This becomes even more evident when we are dealing with iOS devices, as the variety of models and different versions of iOS implies that the procedure to be carried out to achieve a satisfactory acquisition will be different, depending on the device itself. Often, a particular tool, exploit, or vendor solution will stop working if the device is updated to a new iOS release. This is the case for most jailbreaks that rely on publicly disclosed vulnerabilities that are subsequently patched by Apple. A further challenge is represented...