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 Apollo

So far, we have learned how to manually analyze pattern-of-life data by querying the SQLite databases. However, there is another option that automates the process and allows the investigator to look at all the data in a unified database.

Apollo, which stands for Apple Pattern of Life Lazy Output'er, is a Python script developed by Sarah Edwards (@iamevltwin) that correlates multiple sources of data into a unified timeline, simplifying the examiner's job of finding out what exactly was happening on the device.

The tool consists of dozens of highly configurable modules that each query a specific iOS database to extract data and events. The main Python script then compiles the results of each module into a unified CSV file or SQLite database.

We'll now go over the steps required to download the tool, run it, and export the results into a single SQLite database:

  1. To download Apollo, head over to its GitHub repository located at https:/...