Abstract:
The tremendous growth in the technology during the last few years has left a great
impact on every field of life including the way people interact with each other. Social
media applications not only provide the means of connecting people together but also
enable them to do this with ease and security. That’s why there are so many ways a
person can utilize social media application whether it is for personal use or for business
purposes. The increased dependency on social media application has also resulted in
greater risks. The chances of getting personal information or data leaked could result in
loss of privacy and many other attacks. Anonymity in the use of these application makes
them a great platform of carrying out illegal activities for example, fraud, identity theft,
cyber-bullying and blackmailing. All these attributes make these applications an ideal
candidate for conducting digital forensics.
IMO, Voxer Walkie Talkie, Signal and Google Allo are the applications that we have
thoroughly studied in this research work. The platform on which these applications were
installed and used is Android version 5.1.1. Smart-phone is analyzed and examined
to find potential locations that may contain artifacts left by the applications. Also, a
complete ROM analysis is done to check for the application related data in unallocated
space. Details of all the artifacts created by four applications are discussed. We also
correlated different artifacts together to get a full picture of the incident while using
the application. We were also able to retrieve significant amount of evidentiary data,
including images and database files from unallocated space.
