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

Analyzing networking data

Modern smartphones rely more than ever on a networking connection to perform their tasks and enrich the user's experience. At the beginning of this chapter, we discussed cellular-related artifacts; now, we will focus on Wi-Fi connections before discussing network usage in general.

Analyzing the networking data that's provided by an iOS device can give the investigator a precise idea of what services and applications are consuming bandwidth, and which networks the device is connected to.

We'll introduce the topic by learning how to extract some basic networking-related data from a full filesystem.

Airplane mode

To detect if the device was placed in airplane mode or not, you can examine the com.apple.radios.plist file, which is located at /private/var/preferences/SystemConfiguration/. The PLIST contains an AirplaneMode key with a value of true or false.

Wi-Fi MAC address

The MAC address of the wireless network interface within...