Comprehensive Report: Digital Forensics in IOS Operating System Design

This report summarizes the article "Digital Forensics Design of IOS Operating System," which explores the significance of digital forensics in mobile devices, particularly within the IOS ecosystem. The article discusses the architecture of a digital forensics system (DFS) for IOS, which includes data access, interface, and business logic layers. It outlines key system functions such as data collection, cloud storage management, and data analysis. The report highlights data acquisition techniques using usbmuxd and iTunes, and it also mentions file recovery methods for raw data. The DFS design is heavily reliant on the IOS system, employing various technologies like USB communication, MySQL databases, and the .NET Framework. The paper's conclusion emphasizes the implementation and design of DFS for IOS, covering digital acquisition and data analysis systems, as well as methods for file recovery.

Information Security Technologies
Digital Forensics Design of IOS Operating System
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Article Summary
In recent times, there is high use of mobile devices consists of smart phones as an
indispensable tool. It is useful for individuals in their day-to-day activities providing
convenience along with rise in criminal activities. This mainly consists of SMS fraud, virus
software, harmful information dissemination and others. So, it become essential to develop
the use of digital forensics showing its great significance under operating system of IOS for
information security, combating crime and other concerns. According to this article by
Zhendong Liao and others, it is essential within the electronic forensics field to bring digital
forensics as an emerging technology where the growth of “mobile digital forensics” rapid
with the massive impact on criminal investigation (Liao, et al., 2019).
Firstly, it is essential to know about the technology being used within this IOS system.
It includes USB Communication under this method which is used on the computer and
between the IOS equipment while performing where there is a need of installing related
services at first as provided by Apple. The services included “Apple Mobile Device Support”
and “Apple Application Support” (FonePaw, 2018). Another aspect used in this system is
MySQL Database having an association with the database management system (DBMS)
adding fast speed, small size and low cost in total of ownership. This is due to storing the data
after analysing it and forensics of mobile phone within the MySQL database. Other than this,
Windows is secondary based on the System .NET Framework used as a platform of software
development. This aspect is devoted towards the agile development of software, platform
independence, application development rapidly, and network transparency altogether. Also,
this framework consists of the class libraries of “.NET Framework” and the “Common
Language Runtime” which defines it as a foundation as well (Gregorio, 2019).
Based on this article, there is architecture of DFS (digital forensics system) fully
relied on the IOS System; here, this defines the forensic system within three levels generating
idea based on the classic model of software architecture that is low coupling and high
cohesion. It consists of data access layer, interface layer and business logic layer (Shaikh,
2018). Another term is system function design which consists of the data collection function,
the function of cloud storage management and data analysis function.
Hence, relying on the IOS system is the concept of DFS which is implemented and
researched. Another framework is data acquisition system which defines the source of data
and other than this, forensic method is under the “data collection end system”. Furthermore,
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forensic method is based on Usbmuxd which is used by Apple providing services for the
communication of IOS device and the computer. This service program “usbmux” is for the
IOS device connection listens on the USB port (Gabilondo, 2018). Simultaneously, forensics
method is also based on iTunes which is an application providing free digital media form
Apple. This application allows the function of own backup within an exe file stored under the
corresponding folder. Also, the data gets directly backed up to the IOS device (Brinkmann,
2017). Moreover, the framework of “data analysis end system” plays the parsing module role
within the end overall in the data path of input to parse the original data. Afterwards, the data
is stored to the database from the cache. Lastly, there is also a recovery method for file
collection termed as directories. However, it is not the format for data backup for file format
obtained while using this method that is hoped to parse by the system. There is system of
backing up all the files for the after restoration process. Also, it is possible to resolve the file
specified until and unless the domain and file path are known based on the file structure.
Thus, there is a possibility to find a backup file to the “SHA1” value accordingly along with
the extraction of data (Fitzpatrick, 2020).
This article concludes the implementation and designing of DFS for the operating
system of IOS which consists of digital acquisition and data analysis systems. Also, this
paper analysed and researched the method of digital acquisition depending on the iTunes and
usbmuxd for IOS devices along with proposing a method of file recovery in the directories
for raw data.
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References
Brinkmann, M. (2017, June 12). How to remove extra iTunes components on Windows.
Retrieved from GHacks: https://www.ghacks.net/2017/06/12/how-to-remove-extra-
itunes-components-on-windows/
Fitzpatrick, A. (2020, February 29). How to decrypt an encrypted iPhone backup. Retrieved
from iPhone Backup Extractor:
https://www.iphonebackupextractor.com/blog/decrypting-encrypted-itunes-backups/
FonePaw. (2018, December 13). What Is Apple Mobile Device Support & How to Download
It? Retrieved from FonePaw: https://blog.fonepaw.com/apple-mobile-device-support-
download.html
Gabilondo, J. (2018, December 10). Understanding usbmux and the iOS lockdown service.
Retrieved from Medium:
https://medium.com/@jon.gabilondo.angulo_7635/understanding-usbmux-and-the-
ios-lockdown-service-7f2a1dfd07ae
Gregorio. (2019, December 10). How to fully reinstall Apple Components (Windows PC).
Retrieved from iMazing:
https://support.imazing.com/hc/en-us/articles/115001146674-How-to-fully-reinstall-
Apple-Components-Windows-PC-
Liao, Z., Wu, S., Xi, B., Wang, F., Ming, D., & Chen, B. (2019, June). Digital Forensics
Design of IOS Operating System. Retrieved from Proceedings of the 2019 3rd High
Performance Computing and Cluster Technologies Conference:
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3341069.3341081
Shaikh, H. (2018, April 25). iOS Forensics. Retrieved from Infosec:
https://resources.infosecinstitute.com/ios-forensics/#gref
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