With the APOLLO v1.0 update, I updated many of the Application Activity modules used with the knowledgeC.db database. I mentioned in this article that these were updated to provide more context to specific user application activities.

One column in particular that was added to all the App Activity modules is Z_DKAPPLICATIONACTIVITYMETADATAKEY__USERACTIVITYREQUIREDSTRING from the ZSTRUCTUREDMETADATA table. I will refer to this as “User Activity Required String” as that is what I’ve named it in the APOLLO modules.

I will start with some of the application activity parsers for the native iOS apps. The first one, Maps, is particularly difficult but holds some really interesting and useful data.

Maps - knowledge_app_activity_maps

Many of the ‘User Activity Required String’ BLOBs for Maps looks more or less like the following (some are smaller, some larger.) Many investigators will recognize the base64. Whenever you are looking at an Apple device and see base64, you will want to decode it – there is usually great data in there!

You may also notice some readable text at the top of these BLOBs such as in this one. This can help provide quick context, so you can tell if you need to take the time to decode it. This example shows I searched for “Mike Serio’s Po-boys in New Orleans” while at BSidesNoLA this past October. (They were delicious.)

v1.0/com.apple.Maps/t='Mike%20Serio%27s%20Po-boys%20in%20New%20Orleans'&u=

….and others including searches, dropped pins, and directions.

v1.0/com.apple.Maps/t='Show%20DoubleTree%20by%20Hilton%20Hotel%20New%20Orleans'&u=

v1.0/com.apple.Maps/t='Dropped%20Pin%20on%20Nebovidsk%C3%A1%20459%2F3,%20Prague'&u=

v1.0/com.apple.Maps/t='Get%20directions%20to%20The%20Hotel%20at%20Arundel%20Preserve'&u=

v1.0/com.apple.Maps/t='The%20Remedy%20Room%0ADirection%20from%20My%20Location'&u=

I extracted just the base64 string (between the two $ signs) and decoded it on the command line with base64 and then piped it to xxd so I could see what it was. The string ‘BZh11AY&SY’ tells me we are working with a bzip archive file.

This BLOB has four extra bytes at the beginning that we need to remove before we are able to interpret the bzip archive. We can use ‘tail -c +5’ to easily remove these so we get the bzip header right at the beginning.

Next we will pipe this to bzcat to see what is in this archive, again using xxd last so I can see what it might be. bzcat will extract the contents of a bzip archive to standard out.

Would you look at that, we have a protobuf! I’m not surprised to see this data format; it shows up everywhere! We can parse protobufs with protoc. I will let the reader have fun determining what all is in this protobuf. Might I recommend starting with my article on Apple protobufs.

There we have it, the hoops we have to jump through to get the actual maps data. Thanks Apple, keeping it fun! Here is a quick and dirty recap of my decoding process:

Take the SQLite BLOB ➡️ Extract & Decode base64 ➡️ Remove first 4 bytes using tail ➡️ Unarchive bzip with bzcat ➡️ Decode protobuf with protoc

echo "<base64>” | base64 -D | tail -c +5 | bzcat | protoc --decode_raw

Fortunately, while fun, not all of these apps have crazy base64-bzip-protobuf blobs. Mail, Notes, Safari, Photos, Clock, Weather, and Calendar are relatively easy to visually parse and can provide context to what specifically is happening with the application. Some examples below.

Mail - knowledge_app_activity_mail

Shows access to different email accounts and boxes.

Notes - knowledge_app_activity_notes

Shows which notes are being edited. This one shows my note detailing what I need for my last vacation.

Safari - knowledge_app_activity_safari

Shows specific Safari browsing data - I’m looking at fancy hotels for my trip!

Photos - knowledge_app_activity_photos

Which photo albums am I viewing, certainly not the one with all my cat pictures. 🤫

Clock - knowledge_app_activity_clock

Did I just cancel my early morning alarm or am I timing how long this meeting is going?

Weather - knowledge_app_activity_weather

Weather may be particularly interesting as it as geo location coordinates embedded. However, they might be someplace I am or am looking to go! You may want to correlate with location data extracted with APOLLO.

Calendar - knowledge_app_activity_calendar

I might be checking meetings or checking how long until the next Objective by the Sea conference is. You should go, it’s in Maui!

3rd Party Apps - knowledge_app_activity

Now we go to the generic App Activity module to review some activities from 3rd party applications. I won’t create modules for every 3rd party application because there are so many. Some applications will have data in knowledgeC.db, some will not.

First up we have my favorite time sink, Twitter. I can see access to specific tweets as well as whichever profile pages you are Twitterstalking.

Dropbox shows access to documents with the Dropbox application.

Venmo shows me paying my debts. The User Activity Required Strings shows interesting information about the contact like their Venmo ID, how many friends they have, friend status, and their Venmo join date.