An Android Cloud Storage Apps Forensic Taxonomy

TL;DR

This paper analyzes various Android cloud storage apps using forensic tools and proposes a taxonomy to aid investigations by identifying residual artefacts across multiple applications.

Contribution

It introduces a novel forensic taxonomy for Android cloud storage apps based on residual artefacts, enhancing investigation methods.

Findings

Residual artefacts identified from 31 cloud apps

Taxonomy reflects artefacts for forensic investigation

Assists future investigations involving cloud storage apps

Abstract

Mobile phones have been playing a very significant role in our daily activities for the last decade. With the increase need for these devices, people are now more reliant on their smartphone applications for their daily tasks and many prefer to save their mobile data on a cloud platform to access them anywhere on any device. Cloud technology is the new way for better data storage, as it offers better security, more flexibility, and mobility. Many smartphones have been investigated as subjects, objects or tools of the crime. Many of these investigations include analysing data stored through cloud storage apps which contributes to importance of cloud apps forensics on mobile devices. In this paper, various cloud Android applications are analysed using the forensics tool XRY and a forensics taxonomy for investigation of these apps is suggested. The proposed taxonomy reflects residual artefacts retrievable from 31 different cloud applications. It is expected that the proposed taxonomy and the forensic findings in this paper will assist future forensic investigations involving cloud based storage applications.