Forensics Analysis of WhatsApp in Android Mobile Phone

Abstract

One of the popularly known social media platforms is WhatsApp. It has many features such as chat, calling, video calling, multimedia messages lo-cation-sharing, documents etc. At present, there are 1.5 billion WhatsApp users across the world. A newly added feature in WhatsApp allows the sender to delete the sent messages within 1 hour from the receiver’s end where it will show that "This message was deleted". This feature provides the facility to delete the mes-sages. That is sent unknowingly. But, this mechanism is also imposing challenges for law enforcement and policymaker. The deleted messages may have digital evidence to trace the cybercrime, which will be hard to retrieve at receiver’s end when it is deleted by the sender. In this research paper, we proposed to analyze the artefacts of WhatsApp database using the various forensics tools and compare the efficiency of the tools i.e. which one is able to reconstruct the chronology of WhatsApp database.

Keywords: Digital Forensics, Whatsapp, acquisition, mobile forensic, extraction