In iOS device forensics, the process of low-level extraction plays a crucial role in accessing essential data for analysis. Bootloader-level extraction through checkm8 has consistently been the best and most forensically sound method for devices with a bootloader vulnerability. But even though we brought the best extraction method to Linux and Windows in recent releases, support for iOS 16 on these platforms was still lacking behind. In this article we’ll talk about the complexities in iOS 16 extractions and how we worked around them in the newest release of iOS Forensic Toolkit.

The latest update to iOS Forensic Toolkit brought the ability to mount HFS disk images extracted from legacy Apple devices as drive letters on Windows systems. This new capability to mount HFS images on Windows empowers experts to efficiently process and analyze digital evidence extracted from legacy Apple devices on Windows-based computers. This article provides detailed instructions on using the new feature.

In older iPhones, the ‘file system dirty’ flag indicates unclean device shutdown, which affects the ability to perform bootloader-level extractions of Apple devices running legacy versions of iOS (prior to iOS 10.3 released in March 2017). As such, the “file system dirty” flag must be cleared before the extraction. In this article we discuss the very different forensic implications of this flag if it is set on the Data or System partitions.