Analyzing the Security and Data Remnants of Android Freelancing Applications

Abstract

Freelancing applications have gotten quite attention in the past few years due to the perks one gets from it such as working independence, higher pay rates, flexible timings, and exposure. People tend to go for freelancing, as they want to work for themselves instead of working for others. Due to online freelancing platforms like Freelancer, Upwork, and Fiverr people can work on international projects while sitting in their home town. They get to work for international clients and get an experience on a whole different level. The freelancing platform work as a middleman between freelancers and clients. Freelancing platforms charge both freelancers and clients for the services they provide. Freelancing Applications managed through Smart Phones have excellent contribution towards the project completion and it also provides better communication. Freelancing platforms store sensitive information of individuals e.g., project-related conversations, project files, important credentials, payment methods, financial transaction logs, etc. which can be exploited by the malicious party for their interests. Information stored by the freelancing application can be used for digital investigation and this information can also be used to gain access to personal data and account information for different purposes. In this study, Freelancing applications are downloaded and installed on the mobile phone and a set of different activities are performed e.g. account creation, profile setup, project posting, conversations, project award & completion, and giving review to the freelancer and then deleting the application from the mobile phone. At each step, the logical image of the mobile phone was acquired and examination & analysis were performed, after the thorough examination, we have concluded that Upwork is the best among the other app as the minimum artifacts were found regarding the Upwork app. The purpose of the research is identification and classification of digital artifacts to be found in android mobile phone devices when using freelancing applications. The remnants gathered from the freelancing applications will be shown in the analysis which will help investigators to have a better picture and insight into the behavior of freelancing applications.