Comparative Evaluation Of The Effectiveness Of Smartphone Forensics Tools.

Abstract

Technological growth in mobile phones and the development of smart phones has led to increased use and dependence on the mobile phone. The explosion use of mobile phones has led to fraud, cyber stalking, Harassment, Child pornography and other criminal incidents linked with mobile phones. There is a need for suitable mobile phone forensic tools that can be used to conduct a proper investigation by retrieving relevant artifacts that can be presented and hold a case before a jury in Kenya. Smartphone forensics which is part of digital forensics requires tools that are capable of recovering what is important for the forensic examiner or investigator. During the Evaluation of the tools used in Kenya, Most of the Investigative organizations preferred Oxygen suite and Cellebrite to acquire and Analyze the data but our research also looked at what the Open source tool can retrieve from the images acquired. Total of five smartphones were imaged and analyzed, Oxygen suite retrieved more WhatsApp messages on iPhone compare to Cellebrite and Autopsy this means that it is the best tool that can be used for acquisition of WhatsApp artifacts from iPhone phones, when it comes to acquisition of Contacts, Pictures, Text Messages and call logs from smartphone, Cellebrite Touch is the best.T-tool (Autopsy) is an open source software for forensic which can run on Linux and Windows but could not retrieve many artifacts from all the five phones used in the experiment. Other software’s like MOBILedit, Moblyze, and Elcomsoft for iPhones where also used by some Few organizations.