Retracing the Flow of the Stream: Investigating Kodi Streaming Services
This research provides a valuable resource for forensic investigators to combat the use of Kodi and similar platforms for illegal content distribution, particularly child sexual abuse material.
This paper investigates how Kodi, an open-source streaming platform, is exploited for illegal activities, including the distribution of child sexual abuse material. The authors developed a new method to locate Kodi artifacts and gather information, demonstrating its effectiveness across Windows, Android, and Linux platforms to identify file locations, artifacts, and viewed content history.
Kodi is of one of the world's largest open-source streaming platforms for viewing video content. Easily installed Kodi add-ons facilitate access to online pirated videos and streaming content by facilitating the user to search and view copyrighted videos with a basic level of technical knowledge. In some countries, there have been paid child sexual abuse organizations publishing/streaming child abuse material to an international paying clientele. Open source software used for viewing videos from the Internet, such as Kodi, is being exploited by criminals to conduct their activities. In this paper, we describe a new method to quickly locate Kodi artifacts and gather information for a successful prosecution. We also evaluate our approach on different platforms; Windows, Android and Linux. Our experiments show the file location, artifacts and a history of viewed content including their locations from the Internet. Our approach will serve as a resource to forensic investigators to examine Kodi or similar streaming platforms.