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

Performing a filesystem acquisition

In the first part of this chapter, we learned that a full filesystem acquisition is generally the best way to extract the largest number of artifacts from an iOS device and that this acquisition can be carried out by jailbreaking the device, exploiting the Checkm8 vulnerability, or by performing an agent-based acquisition.

We'll now put this into practice by performing a Checkm8 full filesystem acquisition using Cellebrite UFED, which has a built-in Checkm8 solution. Then, we'll perform an agent-based acquisition using Elcomsoft iOS Forensic Toolkit.

Both acquisitions provide the same result: an image of the entire filesystem. Checkm8 acquisitions can be considered forensically sound and represent the best option, although newer devices are not compatible with this method. On the other hand, agent-based acquisitions require you to install an application on the device, which will make some minor changes to system log files, but this...