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 3: Using Forensic Tools

In the previous chapter, we learned all about the different acquisition techniques and how to use forensic tools to extract data from iOS devices. In this chapter, we will learn which are the most popular tools for data analysis, and their features and limitations.

Although using forensic tools for data analysis is not strictly required since theoretically it is possible to examine files manually, using these tools has many advantages. The most evident benefit of using forensic tools compared to manually parsing artifacts is time: if used correctly, these tools are huge time savers as they're programmed to automatically search for relevant files, look for patterns, analyze known data structures, and extract meaningful insights from common artifacts. Using the appropriate tools ensures that precious artifacts are not missed, although the investigator should always validate the output of such tools and know their limitations. There are no perfect...