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

Logs, events, and user interaction

At the start of this chapter, we introduced pattern-of-life forensics, and we learned how iOS stores and analyzes a number of user events and device events. Then, we went through the most common sources of data, such as the KnowledgeC.db database, and learned how iOS represents time through Unix timestamps and Mac absolute time.

Now, we'll take an in-depth look at one of the most forensically interesting SQLite databases you will find on an iOS device.

The KnowledgeC database

KnowledgeC.db is the SQLite database that tracks almost all activity and device events, ranging from battery level to what music was played. The database is located at /private/var/mobile/Library/CoreDuet/Knowledge/, and it is only accessible through a full filesystem acquisition. The database is made of 16 tables, although most of the useful data is concentrated in one of them, the ZOBJECT table.

The following screenshot shows the database schema:

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