Forensic Analysis of WhatsApp on Android Smartphones

• Main Author: Thakur, Neha S
• Format: Others
• Published: ScholarWorks@UNO 2013
• Subjects: Information Assurance; Security; Computer Science; Android; Application Security; Volatile Memory Forensics; Computer Engineering; Computer Sciences; Databases and Information Systems; Other Computer Engineering; Other Computer Sciences; Software Engineering
• Online Access: http://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/1706; http://scholarworks.uno.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2736&context=td

Android forensics has evolved over time offering significant opportunities and exciting challenges. On one hand, being an open source platform Android is giving developers the freedom to contribute to the rapid growth of the Android market whereas on the other hand Android users may not be aware of the security and privacy implications of installing these applications on their phones. Users may assume that a password-locked device protects their personal information, but applications may retain private information on devices, in ways that users might not anticipate. In this thesis we will be concentrating on one such application called 'WhatsApp', a popular social networking application. We will be forming an outline on how forensic investigators can extract useful information from WhatsApp and from similar applications installed on an Android platform. Our area of focus is extraction and analysis of application user data from non-volatile external storage and the volatile memory (RAM) of an Android device.