Journal of Information Technology & Software Engineering
Open Access
ISSN: 2165- 7866
+44 1300 500008
ISSN: 2165- 7866
+44 1300 500008
The domination of social networking applications such as WhatsApp, Facebook, Viber continues to grow exponentially with WhatsApp being the undisputed leader amongst a vast series of social networking and chat messengers with more than 600 million users worldwide and being the number one paid application in more than 131 countries. However the easy availability and the affordability of a messaging medium like WhatsApp also makes its a top target for evil doers and criminals to misuse WhatsApp with malicious intents such as bullying, stalking, sharing threatening, abusive or pornographic content to victims. It is therefore very important to have a sound forensic methodology to extract potential evidences such as chat messages from devices running WhatsApp. The purpose of this research is to present a step by step forensically sound procedure to extract WhatsApp conversations, which are by default encrypted, from a suspect or victim device and later decrypt it to convert it into human readable formats.