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

Summary

In this chapter, we learned what the most popular commercial forensic tools are and the importance of validating results by using multiple tools, comparing their outputs, and running validation tests before starting the examination.

Keep in mind that although these tools are extremely useful and make the investigator's job a lot easier, the tool itself is not the evidence. The report is not the evidence either. The evidence is the evidence, and it's the examiner's job to understand how that evidence was created, what it represents, and what insights can be gained from the analysis of that evidence. Forensic software definitely has a place, but it should not substitute manually examining the artifacts. In other words, use these tools but don't blindly trust them, and make sure you understand what is happening behind the scenes.

Further on in the chapter, we concentrated on two of these tools, Cellebrite Physical Analyzer and Magnet AXIOM. We learned...