iPhone Forensics: Recovering Evidence, Personal Data, and Corporate Assets

by Jonathan Zdziarski

Overview

"This book is a must for anyone attempting to examine the iPhone. The level of forensic detail is excellent. If only all guides to forensics were written with this clarity!"-Andrew Sheldon, Director of Evidence Talks, computer forensics experts

With iPhone use increasing in business networks, IT and security professionals face a serious challenge: these devices store an enormous amount of information. If your staff conducts business with an iPhone, you need to know how to recover, analyze, and securely destroy sensitive data. iPhone Forensics supplies the knowledge necessary to conduct complete and highly specialized forensic analysis of the iPhone, iPhone 3G, and iPod Touch. This book helps you:

• Determine what type of data is stored on the device
• Break v1.x and v2.x passcode-protected iPhones to gain access to the device
• Build a custom recovery toolkit for the iPhone
• Interrupt iPhone 3G's "secure wipe" process
• Conduct data recovery of a v1.x and v2.x iPhone user disk partition, and preserve and recover the entire raw user disk partition
• Recover deleted voicemail, images, email, and other personal data, using data carving techniques
• Recover geotagged metadata from camera photos
• Discover Google map lookups, typing cache, and other data stored on the live file system
• Extract contact information from the iPhone's database
• Use different recovery strategies based on case needs

And more. iPhone Forensics includes techniques used by more than 200 law enforcement agencies worldwide, and is a must-have for any corporate compliance and disaster recovery plan.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780596555030
Publisher:	O'Reilly Media, Incorporated
Publication date:	09/12/2008
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	140
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Jonathan Zdziarski is better known as the hacker "NerveGas" in the iPhone development community. His work in cracking the iPhone helped lead the effort to port the first open source applications, and his book, iPhone Open Application Development, taught developers how to write applications for the popular device long before Apple introduced its own SDK. Prior to the release of iPhone Forensics, Jonathan wrote and supported an iPhone forensics manual distributed exclusively to law enforcement. Jonathan frequently consults law enforcement agencies and assists forensic examiners in their investigations. He teaches an iPhone forensics workshop in his spare time to train forensic examiners and corporate security personnel.



Jonathan is also a full-time research scientist specializing in machine learning technology to combat online fraud and spam, an effort that led him to develop networking products capable of learning how to protect customers. He is founder of the DSPAM project, a high-profile, next-generation spam filter that was acquired in 2006 by Sensory Networks, Inc. He lectures widely on the topic of spam and is a foremost researcher in the fields of machine-learning and algorithmic theory.



Jonathan's website is zdziarski.com.

Table of Contents

Foreword ix Preface xi
1 Introduction to Computer Forensics 1 Making Your Search Legal 1 Rules of Evidence 2 Good Forensic Practices 3 Technical Processes 5
2 Understanding the iPhone 7 What's Stored 8 Equipment You'll Need 10 Determining the Firmware Version 10 Disk Layout 11 Communication 12 Upgrading the iPhone Firmware 13 Restore Mode and Integrity of Evidence 14 Cross-Contamination and Syncing 15
3 Accessing the iPhone 19 Installing the Recovery Toolkit (Firmware v1.0.2-1.1.4) 19 Circumventing Passcode Protection (Firmware v1.0.2-1.1.4) 26 Installing the Recovery Toolkit (Firmware v2.x) 30 Removing the Forensic Recovery/Toolkit 42
4 Forensic Recovery 43 Configuring Wi-Fi and SSH 43 Recovering the Media Partition 47 Data Carving Using Foremost/Scalpel 55 Validating Images with ImageMagick 61 Strings Dump 62 The Takeaway 63
5 Electronic Discovery 65 Converting Timestamps 65 Mounting the Disk Image 66 Graphical File Navigation 67 Extracting Image Geotags with Exifprobe 69 SQLite Databases 70 Important Database Files 72 Property Lists 81 Other Important Files 85
6 Desktop Trace 87 Proving Trusted Pairing Relationships 88 Serial Number Records 91 Device Backups 92 Activation Records 93
7 Case Help 97 Employee Suspected of Inappropriate Communication 97 Employee Destroyed Important Data 100 Seized iPhone: Whose Is It and Where Is He? 101 Appendix Disclosures and Source Code 105 Index 115