Forensic Analysis of Digital Images over Smart Devices and Online Social Networks

Smart mobile devices are increasingly penetrating into every day activities and becoming the key platform for accessing personal and business information. Together with the social networks and the Internet of Things (IoT), smart mobile devices are changing the way we live and communicate. In digital forensics, mobile devices and social networks have becoming essential tools in digital forensic investigation. Both the mobile devices and social networks have also become important sources of essential evidences. In this work, we introduce a mobile forensics analysis framework to identify the user and source mobile phone camera with images taken by this camera using it's sensor patter noise. We further show how to easily make connections between the real user with their account in social networks via the mobile phone camera fingerprint (MCF). The proposed method can bridge the isolated mobile forensic and digital forensic methods together. The experiment results demonstrate the feasibility of our approach.