The provenance of Apple Health data: A timeline of update history

Abstract

Fitness tracking smart watches are becoming more prevalent in investigations and the need to understand and document their forensic potential and limitations is important for practitioners and researchers. Such fitness devices have undergone several hardware and software upgrades, changing the way they operate and evolving as more sophisticated pieces of technology. One example is the Apple Watch, working in conjunction with the Apple iPhone, to measure and record a vast amount of health information in the Apple Health database, healthdb_secure.sqlite. Over time, an end user will update their devices, but their health data, uniquely, carries over from one device to the next. In this paper, we investigate and analyse the hardware and software provenance of a real 5+ year Apple Health dataset to determine changes, patterns and anomalies over time. This provenance investigation provides insights in the form of (1) a timeline, representing the dataset's history of device and firmware updates that can be used in the context of investigation validation, (2) anomaly detection and, (3) insights into cyber hygiene. Analysis of the non-health data recorded in the health database arguably provides just as much insightful information as the health data itself.