A Comparative Analysis of Digital Forensic Investigation Tools on Facebook Messenger Applications

Abstract

Technological developments make it easier for people to communicate and share information. Facebook Messenger is an instant messenger that contains multi-platform for sending text, image, sound, and video messages. Besides being used for positive purposes, this technology can also be used to carry out harmful activities. This study conducts a forensic investigation on a crime simulation in pornographic content distribution using Facebook Messenger as a communication medium on Android smartphones. Perpetrators communicate and send pornographic content in the shape of conversations, audio, and video, then delete them to eliminate traces. Every crime can leave evidence therefore after erasing the track, it can be revealed through digital forensic investigations on the smartphone devices that are used as objects to find digital evidence. The collection of evidence in this study is used four forensic tools with the research stages the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) framework. The study result can be used as evidence by investigators on handling criminal cases with the results obtained in the shape of application versions, accounts, emails, conversation, time of occurrence, pictures, audio, and video. MOBILedit Forensic Express has an accuracy of 84.85%, Wondershare Dr. Fone 36.36%, Magnet Axiom 75.76%, and Belkasoft Evidence Center 69.70%.

A Comprehensive Survey on Artifact Recovery from Social Media Platforms: Approaches and Future Research Directions

“…The literature review findings reveal that Facebook [56,89,91], Whatsapp [33,65,143], and Skype [45,76,137] are the most commonly studied social media applications. These applications have been extensively studied due to their widespread use and popularity.…”

“…Lastly, it was observed that although most research focused on recovering artifacts from social media applications, their purposes varied. While most articles concentrated on artifact recovery from common use cases of an application, such as online shop fraud [84], defamation crimes [95], pornography [56], cyberbullying [110], and web phishing [117], some papers specifically focused on artifacts related to particular application features, such as the "unsend message" feature [55], or a specific storage medium such as Indexed DB [93]. Furthermore, some articles also focused on creating a forensic taxonomy [49], decryption of databases [129,132], comparing tools [140], comparing different versions of applications [135], comparing platforms [66], artifacts recovered in different web browsers [97], detecting patterns in network traffic [74], creating tools [144,148], and reconstructing the sequence of chat messages [134].…”

“…It focuses on promoting international cooperation and consistency in digital investigations [157]. Among the most prevalent frameworks utilized by researchers are NIST [7,26,47,51,52,68,84,95,97,98,102,103,109,117,124,127,[138][139][140], ACPO [35,50,87], McKemmish [41,61], DFRWS [110,112,118], NIJ [56], iFF [21,156], IDFIF2 [90]. Out of all these frameworks, the NIST framework, as shown in Figure 2, is the most commonly utilized across the studies examined for this review.…”