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

Understanding Safari forensics

Analyzing artifacts that have been left by internet browsing activity is typically a crucial aspect of mobile forensic investigations. Almost every activity a suspect performs while using a browser on a mobile device leaves a trace on the device itself, including, of course, searching for information and browsing through web pages.

In this section, we'll focus on the browser that is built into all iOS devices, Safari. Keep in mind that dozens of third-party browsers can be installed on a device, such as Chrome, Firefox, and Opera: it's important to review these applications and analyze their artifacts as they could potentially contain important data. We'll learn how to analyze third-party applications in Chapter 10, Analyzing Third-Party Apps.

Browsing history is likely the most commonly recovered item, but other files should be reviewed too. Typically, the following data can be recovered by analyzing Safari artifacts:

  • Browsing...