iPOD Forensics Update

From student to business worker, the popularity and ubiquity of mobile devices is exploding. As these devices saturate modern culture, they continue to grow in functionality. Such devices can now play music, store photos, contacts, and files or even play full-length movies. Apple’s iPod has taken mobile entertainment to the next level by incorporating all of this into a single device. In fact, the iPod has become so popular that sales have topped nearly sixty seven million units (Apple, 2006). With increased popularity however, criminals have found ways to exploit an otherwise altruistic device. The challenge that lies before law enforcement now becomes identifying the evidence an iPod may contain. Since there has been minimal research in portable music players within the digital forensics community, law enforcement may be fighting blind during their investigations. This paper is an update to previous research by Marsico and Rogers (2005) that presents new procedures and methodologies for law enforcement to obtain digital evidence from the new generations of iPods. As software and hardware revisions have changed, this research analyzes what effect this has on the extraction of evidence.