Posts Tagged ‘EINPB’

When it comes to mobile forensics, experts are analyzing the smartphone itself with possible access to cloud data. However, extending the search to the user’s desktop and laptop computers may (and possibly will) help accessing information stored both in the physical smartphone and in the cloud. In this article we’ll list all relevant artefacts that can shed light to smartphone data. The information applies to Apple iOS devices as well as smartphones running Google Android.

Mobile Artefacts on Desktops and Laptops

Due to the sheer capacity, computer storage may contain significantly more evidence than a smartphone. However, that would be a different kind of evidence compared to timestamped and geotagged usage data we’ve come to expect from modern smartphones.

How can the user’s PC or Mac help mobile forensic experts? There several types of evidence that can help us retrieve data from the phone or the cloud.

  1. iTunes backups. While this type of evidence is iPhone-specific (or, rather, Apple-specific), a local backup discovered on the user’s computer can become an invaluable source of evidence.
  2. Saved passwords. By instantly extracting passwords stored in the user’s Web browser (Chrome, Edge, IE or Safari), one can build a custom dictionary for breaking encryption. More importantly, one can use stored credentials for signing in to the user’s iCloud or Google Account and performing a cloud extraction.
  3. Email account. An email account can be used to reset a password to the user’s Apple or Google account (with subsequent cloud extraction using the new credentials).
  4. Authentication tokens. These can be used to access synchronized data in the user’s iCloud account (tokens must be used on the user’s computer; on macOS, transferable unrestricted tokens may be extracted). There are also tokens for Google Drive (can be used to access files in the user’s Google Drive account) and Google Account (can be used to extract a lot of data from the user’s Google Account). The computer itself is also an artefact as certain authentication tokens are “pinned” to a particular piece of hardware and cannot be transferred to another device. If the computer is a “trusted” device, it can be used for bypassing two-factor authentication.






Let’s plunge into some figures…