A new iPhone forensic tool, Lantern, launches this week at the DoD CyberCrime Conference in St. Louis, Missouri. Lantern enables forensic investigators to perform logical acquisitions, so they can obtain evidence such as call logs, SMS and MMS (text) messages, phonebooks, calendars, and so on…Because it obtains data only from the iPhone, Lantern can extract more data than other commonly used mobile forensic tools. “Mobile forensic examiners place too much pressure on vendors to deliver solutions that support all mobile devices,” said Sean Morrissey, managing director of Katana Forensics. “We wanted to develop a solution that does one thing and does it well.”
This keeps Lantern’s cost down to only a few hundred dollars rather than the several thousand which examiners must often pay for higher profile tools.
Lantern’s focus on a single device also allows examiners to validate the tool more easily than they can with other tools. “Tools that support a broader range of phones are hard to validate because mobile devices’ hardware and firmware are constantly in flux, and examiners cannot take the time to ensure those tools do what they say they will do,” said Morrissey.
Lantern also does not require examiners to export the acquired data to a third-party application like EnCase for analysis. Because they can see everything within the Lantern report interface, maintaining data integrity is easier.
Equally importantly, Lantern maintains legal defensibility of evidence because it does not require the iPhone to be jailbroken to obtain evidence. “Forensic examiners need to be able to testify in court that they obtained their data legally,” said Morrissey. “Jailbreaking an iPhone is not legal because it violates Apple’s copyright.” To develop Lantern, Katana Forensics worked in cooperation with Apple.
A full description of Lantern’s capabilities is available at http://katanaforensics.com.
ABOUT KATANA FORENSICS:
Katana Forensics, LLC was founded in 2010 to address the growing need for “niche” tools in the mobile forensics market. Its “one device, one tool” philosophy means lower costs, better and more accurate data, and solutions that do not violate device manufacturers’ intellectual property rights. The Maryland-based company offers training solutions in addition to software. Visit its website at http://www.katanaforensics.com.
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