Network Forensic Analysis of Twitter Application on Android OS

Abstract

The increased use of secure social media apps on smartphones has attracted the interest of criminals looking to engage in illegal activities. The additional user confidentiality requirements, as well as the security features of these applications, complicate forensic investigations. The extensive analysis of encrypted traffic sessions, on the other hand, has the potential of identifying involved parties and their activities. In this paper, we conduct a network traffic analysis of Twitter, a popular social media application that uses encryption to protect information transmitted over the network. We concentrate on the Android platform to generate Twitter traffic, analyze fixed patterns, and extract artifacts based on various user actions. A firewall is also used to investigate Twitter's hidden design flexibilities and alternate connectivity options. Through our analysis, we were able to correctly identify the flow of Twitter traffic, user-related information, and fixed patterns to classify different user activities on Twitter.