Popular iPhone and iOS Forensic Tools
With the ever increasing popularity of the Apple iPhone and iOS devices, there are a growing number of tools that specifically address the needs of security professionals.
Even free tools now allow an end user to explore data, perform data recovery and run security tests and audit reports.
It’s important that as a security or IT professional that you understand how these tools work so you can better safeguard business data and educate your users if you’re responsible for managing a large number of iPhones (or other iOS devices).
Below are a few of the more popular iPhone and iOS forensic tools. Most of these tools are very easy to use and even end users can analyze collected data and generate detailed audit reports that can be used for either data recovery, security auditing or for legal purposes.
Oxygen-forensic suite
This is one of the most popular mobile forensic suite and is widely used because of its rich feature set. Some of the features of Oxygen-forensic are: recovering phone basic info, multimedia messages, contact lists, call logs, web browser cache, email recovery and geographical coordinates. Besides iPhone and iOS devices, it supports other mobile platforms such Symbian OS, Android, Windows Mobile and RIM BlackBerry devices.
More information: http://www.oxygen-forensic.com/en/
iXAM
iXAM (ig’zam) deals with non-invasive data recovery from various iPhone models as types like 2G, 3G, 3GS and 4 plus iPod Touch. It creates a full image of the iPhone that needs to be analyzed, this created image can then be stored for future references. An audit report is created by iXAM that outlines the whole recovery process as well as documenting audits of various iPhone system components.
More information: http://www.ixam-forensics.com
Lantern
Lantern is a newer iPhone forensics solution developed by Katana Forensics. It creates a physical RAW dd and .dmg image files of all iOS Devices (iPhones as well as iPads and iPods). It is possible to start inspecting data while Lantern is processing any iOS device which makes it very useful to process large number of devices. Mapping of geographical co-ordinates as well as timeline analysis make this tool very powerful and comprehensive. It also has additional support for third party installed applications.
More information: http://katanaforensics.com/forensics/lantern-v2-0/
iPhone Analyzer
This is a handy iPhone forensics tool that can do most of the basic tasks like backing up files, examining different files types as well as the internal structure of iPhone. It is free to download and use and it’s also open source which gets a thumbs up from us!
More information: http://sourceforge.net/projects/iphoneanalyzer/
Summary
There are many more iPhone and iOS tools on the market since we first created this site and we’re sure there will be many more new tools appearing in the future. These tools are only a sample of what’s out there, but it’s more than enough to get you started with exploring your iPhone and iOS devices.
May 7th, 2011 - Posted in Opinions, Story | |
