Title :
Forensic Collection and Analysis of Thumbnails in Android
Author :
Ming Di Leom;Christian Javier DOrazio;Gaye Deegan;Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo
Author_Institution :
Inf. Assurance Res. Group, Univ. of South Australia, Adelaide, SA, Australia
Abstract :
JPEG thumbnail images are of interest in forensic investigations as images from the thumbnail cache could be intact even when the original pictures have been deleted. In addition, a deleted thumbnail is less likely to be fragmented due to its small size. The focus of existing literature is generally on the desktop environment. Considering the increasing capability of smart mobile devices, particularly Android devices, to take pictures and videos on the go, it is important to understand how thumbnails can be collected from these devices. In this paper, we examine and describe the various thumbnail sources in Android devices and propose a methodology for thumbnail collection and analysis from Android devices. We also demonstrate the utility of our proposed methodology using a case study (e.g. thumbnails could be recovered even when the file system is heavily fragmented). Our findings also indicate that collective information obtained from the recovered fragmented JPEG image (e.g. metadata) and the thumbnail could be akin to recovering the full image for forensic purposes.
Keywords :
"Androids","Humanoid robots","Forensics","Media","Australia","Mobile handsets","File systems"
Conference_Titel :
Trustcom/BigDataSE/ISPA, 2015 IEEE
DOI :
10.1109/Trustcom.2015.483