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 iOS artifacts

Generally speaking, the artifacts that can be found on an iOS device can be grouped into one of the following categories:

  • SQLite databases
  • Property lists
  • Protocol buffers
  • XML files
  • Log files

While the last two files don't pose any kind of concern as they are essentially text files and, as such, can be viewed with pretty much any text editor, the others may be (and often are) stored in binary format, so they require specific tools or libraries to parse through the data.

Introducing SQLite

Almost every application on an iOS device, including system ones like Messages, Contacts, or Email, needs a place to store data for the long term. This is achieved by using SQLite, which is an open source, small, self-contained relational database. SQLite databases can be recognized by the .sqlite or .sqlite3 file extensions, although some databases are given the .db extension, or other extensions as well.

The reason why SQLite...