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

Introducing pattern-of-life forensics

If you have never had the opportunity to take a close look at an iOS device's pattern-of-life data, you'll likely be surprised by the amount and variety of data that is collected, stored, and processed during normal smartphone use. Typically, this data is used by the operating system to provide customized recommendations to the user, such as Siri's suggestions.

What exactly is pattern-of-life forensics? This data is all about user behavior and device usage, and it allows the investigator to answer questions such as the following:

  • What has the user been using the device for?
  • What have they accessed?
  • Who have they communicated with?

From a forensic perspective, analyzing pattern-of-life data is extremely useful, not only to identify all activities performed on the device in a given period of time but also to build a profile of the device owner; by analyzing the data collected by iOS, the investigator will...