MEAT – This Toolkit Aims To Help Forensicators Perform Different Kinds Of Acquisitions On iOS Devices
M.E.A.T. – Mobile Evidence Acquisition Toolkit
Meet M.E.A.T!
From Jack Farley – BlackStone Discovery
This toolkit aims to help forensicators perform different kinds of acquisitions on iOS devices (and Android in the future).
Requirements to run from source
- Windows or Linux
- Python 3.7.4 or 3.7.2
- Pip packages seen in requirements.txt
Types of Acquisitions Supported
iOS Devices
Logical
Using the logical acquisition flag on MEAT will instruct the tool to extract files and folders accessible through AFC on jailed devices. The specific folder that allows access is: privatevarmobileMedia, which includes fodlers such as:
- AirFair
- Books
- DCIM
- Downloads
- general_storage
- iTunes_Control
- MediaAnalysis
- PhotoData
- Photos
- PublicStaging
- Purchases
- Recordings
Filesystem
iOS Device Prerequisites
- Jailbroken iOS Device
- AFC2 Installed via Cydia
Using the filesystem acquisition flag on MEAT will instruct the tool to start the AFC2 service and copy all files and fodlers back to the host machine.
This method requires the device to be jailbroken with the following package installed:
- Apple File Conduit 2
This method can also be changed by the user using the -filesystemPath flag to instruct MEAT to only extract up a specified folder, useful if you’re doing app analysis and only want the app data.
MEAT Help
usage: MEAT.py [-h] [-iOS] [-filesystem] [-filesystemPath FILESYSTEMPATH]
[-logical] [-md5] [-sha1] -o OUTPUTDIR [-v]
MEAT - Mobile Evidence Acquisition Toolkit
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-iOS Perform Acquisition on iOS Device
-filesystem Perform Filesystem Acquisition -
-filesystemPath FILESYSTEMPATH
Path on target device to acquire. Only use with --filesystem argument
Default will be "/"
-logical Perform Logical Acquisition
iOS - Uses AFC to gain access to jailed content
-md5 Hash pulled files with the MD5 Algorithm. Outputs to Hash_Table.csv
-sha1 Hash pulled files with the SHA-1 Algorithm. Outputs to Hash_Table.csv
-o OUTPUTDIR Directory to store results
-v increase output verbosity
Devices tested on
iPhone X iOS 13.3 iPhone XS iOS 12.4
Known issues
- Folder timestamp preservation
- Can’t preserve birth time of files on Linux only
- iOS 9 bugs – Don’t have device so can’t test directly
Things to do in the future – Ranked
- Add post processors
- Add ability to containerize – ZIP, TAR, AFF4
- I tried to containerize while processing, but zipfile and tar don’t allow me to keep appending blocks to individual files
- Add keyword searching while processing or after
- Add hash matching while processing or after
- Add Android support (Some code can already do this, but I don’t have a device to test on)
- Add ability for the user to specify block device for android physical acquisitions
- Add support for iTunes backups
- Add MacOS support (message me if you want this!)
Special Thanks
- BlackStone Discovery
- pymobiledevice
- Mathieu Renard for fixing the iOS 13 bug
- Thanks W.E.