A study of user relationships in smartphone forensics

Abstract

During a criminal investigation it is important to find the relation between criminals or people of interest, i.e. finding a person of interest will provide important evidence or lead in said investigation. A smartphone is a useful evidence to find related criminals because smartphones store their contacts information. However, simply using smartphone data can prove difficult to grasp the relationship between the user and connected people. In addition, due to the increase in smartphone data, a modern approach is needed for the investigation. If an investigator can use the recorded data on the smartphone and look at the contact data as a number, they therefore, can grasp the relationship between the user and the contact which will be a more efficient way of finding people of interest. I.e. a high number means they are close to one another. A close relationship is an indication of a high possibility that they may be criminally related. This paper proposes a method which shows connectivity, between a user and another as a numerical value, by using recorded data of SMS/MMS, Call applications, contact information and stored time information. This number is based on amount of times one user has contacted another user, we called the number `Relation Point'. We use the normalization database to efficiently utilize various application data. Therefore, a relation point experiment is performed by smartphone forensic software, which uses the algorithm. The experiment result verifies effectiveness.