Identifying interception possibilities for WhatsApp communication
This addresses a critical gap for law enforcement agencies in monitoring criminal activities using encrypted apps, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing forensic methods.
The paper tackles the problem of law enforcement's inability to access real-time encrypted WhatsApp communications for criminal investigations by proposing a forensic approach that combines wiretapping, decryption, and analysis, achieving feasibility and efficiency in various scenarios.
On a daily basis, law enforcement officers struggle with suspects using mobile communication applications for criminal activities. These mobile applications replaced SMS-messaging and evolved the last few years from plain-text data transmission and storage to an encrypted version. Regardless of the benefits for all law abiding citizens, this is considered to be the downside for criminal investigations. Normal smartphone, computer or network investigations do no longer provide the contents of the communication in real-time when suspects are using apps like WhatsApp, Signal or Telegram. Among them, WhatsApp is one of the most common smartphone applications for communication, both criminal as well as legal activities. Early 2016 WhatsApp introduced end-to-end encryption for all users, immediately keeping law enforcement officers around the world in the dark. Existing research to recuperate the position of law enforcement is limited to a single field of investigation and often limited to post mortem research on smartphone or computer while wiretapping is limited to metadata information. Therefore, it provides only historical data or metadata while law enforcement officers want a continuous stream of live and substantive information. This paper identified that gap in available scenarios for law enforcement investigations and identified a gap in methods available for forensic acquiring and processing these scenarios. In this paper, we propose a forensic approach to create real-time insight in the WhatsApp communication. Our approach is based on the wiretapping, decrypting WhatsApp databases, open source intelligence and WhatsApp Web communication analysis. We also evaluate our method with different scenarios in WhatsApp forensics to prove its feasibility and efficiency.