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

Triaging the device

When you're dealing with iOS devices, it's useful to gather some information directly from the device prior to starting the acquisition process. Knowing what iOS version is running on the device, for instance, can be useful to determine what the best acquisition method is. For this purpose, we're going to use libimobiledevice.

The libimobiledevice library is a cross-platform library that allows users to communicate with an iOS device using their native protocol to provide access to the device's filesystem, including information about the device and its internals. It works with all devices, including the most recent ones.

The first step is to head to http://libimobiledevice.org, where the library can be downloaded for free. If you're running Windows, instead of downloading the source files and compiling them, you can download precompiled binaries from the project's GitHub repository.

If you're running macOS, you can install...