September 2008
Intermediate to advanced
140 pages
3h 31m
English
Content preview from iPhone ForensicsBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Disk Layout
By default, the iPhone is configured with two disk partitions. These do not reside on a physical disk drive (the type with spinning platters) since the iPhone uses a solid state NAND flash, but are treated as a disk by storing a partition table and formatted filesystem on the flash.
The first partition is a 300 MB system (root) partition used to house the operating system and all of the preloaded applications used with the iPhone. This partition is mounted as read-only by default, and is designed to stay in a factory state for the entire life of the iPhone. The remaining available space is assigned to the user (or “media”) partition, which is mounted as /private/var on the iPhone. This partition is where all of the user data gets written—everything from music to personal contacts. This dual-partition scheme was the most logical way for Apple to perform easy upgrades to the iPhone software, because the first partition can be formatted by iTunes without deleting any of the owner’s music or other data.
Because the system partition is intended to remain in a factory state by default, there is no useful evidentiary information that can be obtained from it—it’s essentially irrelevant in forensics. The second partition is where all of the useful information resides, and so the first partition is safe for installing forensic tools. The tools used in the coming chapters will be used to remount the system partition as read-write to allow the installation of an open source forensic ...
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