The newly released iOS Forensic Toolkit 8.0 delivers forensically sound checkm8 extraction powered with a command-line interface. The new user experience offers full control over the extraction process, yet mastering the right workflow may become a challenge for those unfamiliar with command-line tools. In this quick-start guide we will lay out the steps required to perform a clean, forensically sound extraction of a compatible iPhone or iPad device.

The ninth beta of iOS Forensic Toolkit 8.0 for Mac introduces forensically sound, checkm8-based extraction of sixteen iPad, iPod Touch and Apple TV models. The low-level extraction solution is now available for all iPad and all iPod Touch models susceptible to the checkm8 exploit.

For almost a decade, if not longer, I have collaborated with Vladimir Katalov on various digital forensics research topics.  He has always been a great source of guidance, especially on iOS related challenges.  When he offered me a standing invitation to post on the Elcomsoft Blog, I felt very humbled and honored to be given the opportunity to post on the ElcomSoft Blog, and I would like to thank the ElcomSoft team.  This article has also been prepared together, with Vladimir Katalov.

When investigating iOS devices, you may have seen references to the SoC generation. Security researchers and developers of various iOS jailbreaks and exploits often list a few iPhone models followed by a note that mentions “compatible iPad models”. This is especially common when discussing iOS forensics, particularly referring to the checkra1n jailbreak. What do those references mean, and how are the iPhone and iPad models related? Can we count the iPod Touch and Apple TV, too? Let’s have a look.

UPDATE June 2, 2018: USB Restricted Mode did not make it into iOS 11.4. However, in iOS 11.4.1 Beta USB Restricted Mode Has Arrived

With all the trouble of jailbreaking iOS 8 devices and the lack of support for 64-bit hardware, does iOS physical acquisition still present meaningful benefits to the investigator? Is it still worth your time and effort attempting to acquire that iPhone via a Lightning cord?

Last week we have released our new product, EPPB, out of beta. We have fixed some bugs, polished GPU acceleration support, added support for Tableau TACC1441 hardware accelerator, making this program the world's first program capable of utilizing computing power of GPUs both from ATI and NVIDIA as well as dedicated hardware accelerators aimed primarily on computer forensics specialists. We have also included ability to run brute-force attacks and not only wordlist-based attacks. Latter were improved with ability to enable/disable individual types of password mutations and set customized level to any of them.