Smartphones as distributed witnesses for digital forensics

Abstract

Smartphones have become an integral part of people’s lives. Their wide range of capabilities and support of diverse applications result in a wealth of data being stored in smartphone memory. Although tools are available to extract and view the data stored in smartphones, no comprehensive process exists for event reconstruction using the extracted data. Data in smartphones is typically stored in SQLite databases and can, therefore, be easily transformed. To perform event reconstruction, multiple SQLite databases have to be integrated. This paper proposes a novel mobile event reconstruction process that allows for event reconstruction by querying the integrated SQLite databases collected from multiple smartphones. The process can create detailed accounts of the events that took place before, during and after an incident.