Practical Mobile Forensics - Third Edition

Property lists

A property list, commonly referred to as a plist, is a structured data format used to store, organize, and access various types of data on an iOS device as well as a macOS device. Plists are binary-formatted files, and they can be viewed using a Property List Editor, which is capable of reading or converting the binary format to ASCII.

Plist files may or may not have a .plist file extension. To access the data stored in these files, you need a tool that can read them. Some of the good free tools include the following:

• Plist Editor for Windows, which can be downloaded from http://www.icopybot.com/plist-editor.htm
• The plutil command-line utility on macOS

You can also view the plist files using XCode. macOS includes the plutil ...