Forensic Acquisitions of WhatsApp Data on Popular Mobile Platforms

Encryption techniques used by popular messaging services such as Skype, Viber and WhatsApp make traces of illegal activities by criminal groups almost undetectable. This paper reports challenges involved to examine data of the WhatsApp application on popular mobile platforms (iOS, Android and Windows Phone) using latest forensic software such as EnCase, UFED and Oxygen Forensic Suite. The operating systems used were Windows phone 8.1, Android 5.0.1 (Lollipop) and iOS 8.3. Results show that due to strong security features built into the Windows 8.1 system forensic examiners may not be able to access data with standard forensic suite and they must decide whether to perform a live forensic acquisition. This paper provides forensics examiners with practical techniques for recovering evidences of WhatsApp data from Windows 8.1 mobile operating systems that would otherwise be inaccessible.