Social Network Forensics : Tapping the Data Pool of Social Networks

With hundreds of millions social network users worldwide, forensic data extraction on social networks has become an important research problem. The forensic data collection is however tightly connected to the service operator, which leads to data completeness and presentation format issues. Online social networks imply that all user communication is stored entirely at the service operator, without direct access for investigators. In this paper we identify important data sources and analytical methods for automated forensic analysis on social network user data. We furthermore show how these data sources can be evaluated in an automated fashion, and without the need of collaboration from the social network operator. While our proposed methods apply to the great majority of social networks, we show the feasibility of our approach on basis of Facebook.