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Forensic taxonomy of android productivity apps

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Abstract

Android productivity apps have provided the facility of having a constantly accessible and productive workforce to the information and work capabilities needed by the users. With hundreds of productivity apps available in the Android app market, it is necessary to develop a taxonomy for the forensic investigators and the end users to allow them to know what personal data remnants are available from the productivity apps. In this paper, 30 popular Android productivity apps were examined. A logical extraction of the Android phone was collected by using a well-known mobile forensic tool- XRY to extract various information of forensic interest such as user email ID and list of tasks. Based on the findings, a two-dimensional taxonomy of the forensic artefacts of the productivity apps is proposed with the app categories in one dimension and the classes of artefacts in the other dimension. The artefacts identified in the study of the apps are summarised using the taxonomy. In addition, a comparison with the existing forensic taxonomies of different categories of Android apps is provided to facilitate timely collection and analysis of evidentiary materials from mobile devices.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Information Assurance Research Group, University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia

    Abdullah Azfar & Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo

  2. Department of Information Systems and Cyber Security, University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, USA

    Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo

  3. School of Computer Science, China University of Geosciences, Wuhan, China

    Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo

  4. School of Information Technology and Mathematical Sciences, University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia

    Lin Liu

Authors
  1. Abdullah Azfar
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  2. Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo
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  3. Lin Liu
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Correspondence to Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo.

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Azfar, A., Choo, KK.R. & Liu, L. Forensic taxonomy of android productivity apps. Multimed Tools Appl 76, 3313–3341 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-016-3718-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-016-3718-2

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