Forensic Analysis of Tor Browser: A Case Study for Privacy and Anonymity on the Web

Abstract

Web browsers are among the most commonly used applications to access the web from any platform nowadays. With recent digital incidents involving breach of data, users are becoming more cognizant of the threat posed by malicious actors having access to personal data as well as vulnerable applications which may compromise their data. For this very reason, users are being offered privacy preserving solutions for trust maturity. The onion router (Tor) browser is one such application which not only ensures the privacy preservation goals but also provides promising anonymity. Due to this feature, majority of the users use Tor browser for normal use as well as malign activities. In order to validate the claims of Tor browser and help digital forensic investigators and researchers, we created different scenarios to forensically analyze the Tor browser privacy and anonymity. As a result of the findings, it can be concluded that the Tor browser leaves plethora of sensitive digital artifacts on host machine, which can be further used to compromise user data.