Book Image

Practical Mobile Forensics - Fourth Edition

By : Rohit Tamma, Oleg Skulkin, Heather Mahalik, Satish Bommisetty
5 (1)
Book Image

Practical Mobile Forensics - Fourth Edition

5 (1)
By: Rohit Tamma, Oleg Skulkin, Heather Mahalik, Satish Bommisetty

Overview of this book

Mobile phone forensics is the science of retrieving data from a mobile phone under forensically sound conditions. This updated fourth edition of Practical Mobile Forensics delves into the concepts of mobile forensics and its importance in today's world. The book focuses on teaching you the latest forensic techniques to investigate mobile devices across various mobile platforms. You will learn forensic techniques for multiple OS versions, including iOS 11 to iOS 13, Android 8 to Android 10, and Windows 10. The book then takes you through the latest open source and commercial mobile forensic tools, enabling you to analyze and retrieve data effectively. From inspecting the device and retrieving data from the cloud, through to successfully documenting reports of your investigations, you'll explore new techniques while building on your practical knowledge. Toward the end, you will understand the reverse engineering of applications and ways to identify malware. Finally, the book guides you through parsing popular third-party applications, including Facebook and WhatsApp. By the end of this book, you will be proficient in various mobile forensic techniques to analyze and extract data from mobile devices with the help of open source solutions.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Free Chapter
2
Section 1: iOS Forensics
8
Section 2: Android Forensics
14
Section 3: Windows Forensics and Third-Party Apps

The HFS Plus and APFS filesystems

To better understand the forensic process of an iOS device, it is useful to know about the filesystem that is used. Originally, the filesystem used in the iPhone and other Apple iOS devices was HFSX. This is a variation of HFS Plus, with one major difference. HFSX is case-sensitive, whereas HFS Plus is case-insensitive. Other differences will be discussed later in this chapter. APFS was introduced in June 2016 as a replacement for HFS Plus and became the default filesystem for iOS devices with the release of iOS 10.3, and for macOS devices with the release of macOS 10.13.

The HFS Plus filesystem

In 1996, Apple developed a new filesystem, HFS, to accommodate the storage of large datasets. In...