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 pattern-of-life forensics is and how an investigator can benefit from analyzing such data to visualize user behavior and detect abnormal patterns.

First, we introduced some of the databases that contain relevant data, such as KnowledgeC.db and InteractionC.db. Then, we learned how a device handles date and time, and the differences between Unix and Mac timestamps. We also learned how to convert a specific date and time to a timestamp and vice versa.

Later in the chapter, we focused on the most popular database found on an iOS device by performing a full filesystem acquisition – KnowledgeC.db. We learned which are the most data-rich tables and how the data is organized in different columns. Then, we described some of the most interesting events logged by this database and introduced SQL queries that can be used to query the database for application usage and user interaction.

Finally, in the last section of this chapter, we introduced...