A Systematic Survey on Mobile Forensic Tools Used for Forensic Analysis of Android-Based Social Networking Applications

In today’s digital world, social networking applications are being used everywhere. They have multiplied fast and their uses have grown exponentially. An increasing number of our social and economic transactions are taking place with the help of these applications. Unsurprisingly, these developments have attracted the attention of criminals, who commit crimes using the same applications. Fortunately, a criminal almost always leaves behind some evidence of his crime. Forensic investigators have lately shown a great deal of interest in mobile forensics as a means of detecting and fetching digital evidence of such crimes. Evidence can be fetched and deleted data recovered with the help of the right tools and methods. In this paper, some popular social networking applications and mobile forensic tools, namely, Android Debug Bridge (ADB), Open Source Android Forensics (OSAF), XRY, Fastboot, UFED Physical Analyzer, WhatsApp_Xtract, Oxygen Forensic, and MOBILedit Forensic for Android mobile phones have been surveyed.

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