Forensic Analysis Third Party Social Networking Applications on Android Smartphone

Abstract

Smartphone users spend most of their time on device for browsing, emailing, messaging through different apps, using social media. Most popular and commonly used smartphone feature is social networking application and usage of these apps become the dominating part of people daily life. The cybercrimes rate through social networking applications becomes high these days. These crimes include social harassing, abusive message, threats, broadcasting of suicidal actions and live coverage of violent attacks. These social networking applications can, therefore, be helpful in resolving criminal situations through forensic analysis of allegedly-involved digital devices in crime scenes. The primary contribution of this research underlines on performing a forensic investigation in Android Smartphone device on five social networking application that is Instagram, LINE, Whisper, WeChat, and Wickr. The essential motivation behind the examination and tests was centered around finding if there are any data stores within the internal memory of the device after performing some activities on these social networking apps. Data extraction and analysis has been carried out by three tools Magnet Axiom, XRY, Autopsy. From the results of these outcomes, it was presumed that a considerable amount of essential data has been extracted from the Smartphone. This profitable data can be recovered by forensic analysts for future examination for the situation. In the end, tools were analyzed on the basis of their ability to extract evidence from the device and their performance has been examined with respect to NIST standards.