Mobile Verification Toolkit

[!IMPORTANT] We recently merged the "v3" branch. This introduced breaking changes. If you relied on mvt output in other scripts They might have broken. More details: https://github.com/mvt-project/mvt/issues/757

Mobile Verification Toolkit (MVT) is a collection of utilities to simplify and automate the process of gathering forensic traces helpful to identify a potential compromise of Android and iOS devices.

It has been developed and released by the Amnesty International Security Lab in July 2021 in the context of the Pegasus Project along with a technical forensic methodology. It continues to be maintained by Amnesty International and other contributors.

Note MVT is a forensic research tool intended for technologists and investigators. It requires understanding digital forensics and using command-line tools. This is not intended for end-user self-assessment. If you are concerned with the security of your device please seek reputable expert assistance.

Indicators of Compromise

MVT supports using public indicators of compromise (IOCs) to scan mobile devices for potential traces of targeting or infection by known spyware campaigns. This includes IOCs published by Amnesty International and other research groups.

Warning Public indicators of compromise are insufficient to determine that a device is "clean", and not targeted with a particular spyware tool. Reliance on public indicators alone can miss recent forensic traces and give a false sense of security.

Reliable and comprehensive digital forensic support and triage requires access to non-public indicators, research and threat intelligence.

Such support is available to civil society through Amnesty International's Security Lab or through our forensic partnership with Access Now’s Digital Security Helpline.

More information about using indicators of compromise with MVT is available in the documentation.

Installation

MVT can be installed from sources or from PyPI (you will need some dependencies, check the documentation):

pip3 install mvt

You can also install MVT from PyPI with uv. First, install uv:

curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

Then install MVT as a command-line tool:

uv tool install mvt

For alternative installation options and known issues, please refer to the documentation as well as GitHub Issues.

Usage

MVT provides three commands: mvt-ios and mvt-android analyse acquisitions from devices of that platform, and mvt hosts what belongs to neither: version, completion, plugins and download-iocs (version and download-iocs remain available on the platform commands for now). Running mvt on its own shows the installed version, update notices and the available commands. Check out the documentation to learn how to use them!

Pass --verbose to any of the three commands, before the command name (mvt-ios --verbose check-backup ...), for debug output. The --verbose option the check-* commands accept after their name still works but is kept for compatibility only and will be removed in a future release.

Shell completion

MVT can generate a shell completion script for Bash, Zsh, and Fish which covers mvt, mvt-ios and mvt-android:

mvt completion

The command prints setup instructions by default. To generate the completion script directly, pass the shell name:

mvt completion bash

MVT only writes completion files or shell configuration when --install is passed. See the command completion documentation for details.

Plugin packages extend MVT with additional forensic modules, which run inside the check-* commands, and with top-level commands on mvt, mvt-ios and mvt-android. See the development documentation for writing and installing them, and the custom CLI command documentation for the entry points a package registers commands in.

License

The purpose of MVT is to facilitate the consensual forensic analysis of devices of those who might be targets of sophisticated mobile spyware attacks, especially members of civil society and marginalized communities. We do not want MVT to enable privacy violations of non-consenting individuals. In order to achieve this, MVT is released under its own license. Read more here.