I originally released APOLLO at the Objective by the Sea conference in early November. Since then I’ve received a surprising amount of positive feedback about various analysts using this tool or the accompanying SQL queries on their file system dumps to help a variety of investigations.

It now time for a proper introduction. I will present this to you in what I’d like to call “The Twelve Days of APOLLO” a holiday themed (very, very loosely) blog series starting today!

Why

APOLLO stands for Apple Pattern of Life Lazy Output’er. I wanted to create this tool to be able to easily correlate multiple databases with hundreds of thousands of records into a timeline that would make the analyst (me, mostly) be able to tell what has happened on the device.

iOS (and MacOS) have these absolutely fantastic databases that I’ve been using for years with my own personal collection of SQL queries to do what I need to get done. This is also a way for me to share my own research and queries with the community. Many of these queries have taken hours, even days to research and compile into something useful.

My goal with this script is to put the analysis function the SQL query itself. Each query will output a different part of the puzzle. The script itself just compiles the data into a CSV or SQLite database for viewing and filtering. While this database/spreadsheet can get very large, it is still more efficient that running queries on multiple databases and compiling the data into a timeline manually.

Because this script is all based on investigator provided queries it is highly customizable. If an investigator only wants health data, they can elect to run only those query modules. Each query can be customized by the investigator relatively easy, if you don’t need that column – remove or comment it out! I’ve uploaded many queries that I think most investigators would find useful. It is my hope that other investigators create their own and share them with the community.

How

The script is a simple Python script that intakes what I’m calling modules. Each module is a single SQL query that pulls out specific data from a database. The module will also have some metadata about what the SQL query

The module is a text file that contains a few required items:

DATABASE – The exact name of the database to perform the SQL query on.
ACTIVITY – What this particular record is categorized as.
KEY_TIMESTAMP – The timestamp to be used as the key for timelining.
SQL Query – The query that is performed on the database. They query should extract one specific type of record from the database, thus a database may have many modules for very specific outputs.

Depending on what the user is looking for they can run one, some, or all the modules and it will output to either a CSV or SQLite database file.

Example Usage

The script is a simple python script that only takes only a few arguments.

python apollo.py -output {csv, sql} <modules directory> <data directory>

There are two output options, a CSV file or a SQLite database. Please let me know if other outputs are required. Following that, the path to the module’s directory and the path to the data directory. The data directory can be a single directory full of the databases needed to parse or a full file system dump – the script will find the databases by name in the module.

An example of the output is seen below. Each SQL query run will have different output for that particular query and database in the output column. In the example we see everything from health steps/distance, to location, to application usage. The Key column contains the timestamp that each record is organized on, the Activity contains the type of record. The database and module columns contain which database and module parsed that information.

Challenges

One of the main challenges with these Pattern of Life databases is access. Most of the really good forensically useful POL data is not easily accessible, particularly with iOS devices. With macOS devices we may need to deal with FileVault encryption or database level encryption. This script assumes you have good data to work with. Some databases may be available some may not be.

Feedback

While I primarily created this script for my use (don’t we all), I am open to feedback. If instead of using ConfigParser module files you want something else, let me know. If you need different output formats, let me know. I will consider all feedback.

I would appreciate all the help I can get. I’ve primarily tested these queries with a focus on iOS 11, however I know many will work on older versions and some have been tested with available data from iOS 12 (iOS Health). I’ve also tested running the script on macOS with Python 2.7 installed, it may not run as expected on other platforms. (FWIW: I will upgrade to python3 when macOS does.)

The script was just updated to be more efficient by Sam Alptekin of @sjc_CyberCrimes. Sam made the script much faster when running against full file system dumps. He was able to take it down from hours to run to mere minutes. Thanks Sam!

The Next Eleven Days

Each day will have a different topic that will guide you through the usefulness of the APOLLO framework. I focus primarily on iOS in these articles, but many of the queries can be ported over to macOS as well. I do intend to work on this in the future however I will discuss more on improvements later.

I will cover all sorts of topics in the next couple of weeks.