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

Working with Magnet AXIOM

Magnet AXIOM is one of the most popular tools for digital forensics. It supports both computer forensics and mobile forensics, with complete support for almost all Android and iOS devices. The software has two modules, AXIOM Process and AXIOM Examine. The first module is responsible for acquiring evidence from a device or loading an existing extraction, and performs data parsing and decoding. When the decoding process is done, you can use AXIOM Examine to review all recovered artifacts and analyze the data.

Loading evidence and on-the-fly processing

One of the key features of Magnet AXIOM is that it allows investigators to start analyzing artifacts while the data is being processed. This is a life-saving feature in all those circumstances where time is a critical factor and evidence needs to be reviewed as soon as possible.

In the following example, we'll learn how to load an existing filesystem extraction from an iOS device into AXIOM Process...