Snapchat Analysis to Discover Digital Forensic Artifacts on Android Smartphone

Abstract

Smartphones play an important role in our lives. With the advent of applications for smartphones, the more functionalities and services are offered to users. Online social networks (OSN) applications are the most popular applications worldwide. OSN applications, such as Facebook and Twitter, allow users to share personal information such as posts, age, gender, location, photos and videos. This valuable information saved on smartphones' internal memory and could be used as evidence during forensic investigation. Snapchat is a popular OSN application that is available for Android and iOS devices. It allows users to share photos and videos called Snaps with predetermined time to view. Once the time expired, snaps are automatically deleted. This paper analyses artifacts saved by Snapchat application on Android smartphones and identifies their significance to the forensic investigation process.