A Review of Web Browser Forensic Analysis Tools and Techniques

Researchpedia Journal of Computing, Volume 1, Issue 1, Article 2, Pages 15-21, June 2020

Aamir Rasool¹ and Zunera Jalil²

¹Institute of Avionics and Aeronautics, Air University, Islamabad, Pakistan
²Department of Cyber Security, Air University, Islamabad, Pakistan 
Corresponding author: Zunera Jalil (e-mail: zunera.jalil@mail.au.edu.pk).

ABSTRACT Browsers are essential to an active working environment but they also serve as the perfect cyber-attack vector. Cyber-attacks and crimes are multi-faceted in present era and having tendency to outgrow manifold. Digital forensic is a remarkable discipline to limit and investigate such threats by using its sophisticated tools. Web browser is the widely used application to access contents available on the internet and is user’s face to the world. Typical browsing activities involve visiting web pages, accessing email accounts, using social media, uploading and downloading different files. User leaves digital footprints on computing device in the form of various artifacts while using browsers such as cookies, history, bookmarks, passwords, etc. These artifacts can be extracted through a specialized browser forensic toolkit to augment investigator’s task. Researchers, in their previous work, have precisely focused towards specific mode of web-browsers’ forensics and proposed viable investigative tools. In this study, accrued picture of all web-browsing modes (public, private and portable) has been crafted including potent forensic attributes for digital artifact’s collection and comparative analysis of tools.

Keywords Browser forensics; artifacts; log files; Google chrome; live forensics; static acquisition.