An Android Cloud Storage Apps Forensic Taxonomy
This work addresses the need for structured forensic analysis of cloud storage apps on mobile devices, which is crucial for law enforcement and digital forensics professionals, though it is incremental as it builds on existing forensic methods.
The paper tackled the problem of forensic investigation of cloud storage apps on Android devices by analyzing 31 different applications using the XRY tool and proposing a taxonomy of residual artifacts. The result is a forensic taxonomy that categorizes retrievable artifacts to aid in investigations.
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.