I will go ahead and throw my opinion out there.
First of all my firm is all retired law enforcement and so we were trained on Cellebrite from early on.
When we opened up our own shop we spent a lot of time looking at options other than Cellebrite because of the expense (both the 10K initial purchase and the 3K maintenance per year). We tried Sustein's Secureview, Paraben's Device Seizure, Oxygen, and Lantern. Eventually after being in business for about year we went ahead and purchased a Cellebrite UFED Touch Ultimate.
At the present time mobile devices are about 75% of our firms business and about 90% of our firm's charitable work (we provide a lot of free forensic work for law enforcement on child exploitation cases which is what most of us did previously).
Hands down, the UFED is the best tool in our arsenal. It cover's the widest variety of devices and is very highly respected in the legal community. The other main tool that we use for iOS devices primarily is Katana Forensic's Lantern. The attorney's who give us the work generally love the reports from these devices.
We also use the Securview, Device Seizure, and Oxygen on a case by case basis and have had good success with each on several phones. These devices, however are generally only used on those few devices where we have not liked our extractions from our primary tools.
If you are on a budget and you are seeing the overwhelming number of iOS devices that we were, Lantern is an excellent investment. The other tools are nice to have if you go with the multi-platform approach like we have chosen (we never like to return a device with no or poor results if we can help it). If you have the financial ability I would invest in a Cellebrite, they have paid for themselves many times over, and when you are stuck on an issue, their technical support makes the cost more than worth it.
↧