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 cellular forensics

In the first part of this chapter, we will focus on understanding what cellular-related artifacts can be found on an iOS device and what insights we can gain by analyzing such data.

But first, what exactly is cellular data? This term refers to all those artifacts that involve telephony services and data connections, and they allow the investigator to answer questions such as the following:

  • Who has the user communicated with?
  • When did the device register with the cellular network?
  • What websites were browsed on the device?

The first step in our analysis involves extracting some meaningful data from the com.apple.commcenter.plist property list (PLIST), which is located at /private/var/wireless/Library/Preferences/:

Figure 7.1 – The com.apple.commcenter PLIST

This PLIST contains several useful cellular-related values, such as its Integrated Circuit Card Identifier (ICCID), International Mobile Subscriber...