Disappearing Messages: Privacy or Piracy?

Mac Dermott, AM, Heath, H and Akinbi, A (2022) Disappearing Messages: Privacy or Piracy? In: CONF-IRM 2022 Proceedings , 10. (the 15th Association for Information Systems (AIS) International Conference on Information Resources Management (Conf-IRM 2022), Ontario, Canada).

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Abstract

The Telegram instant messenger application is a rival and alternative to the popular messaging application WhatsApp, with both applications citing end-to-end encryption for both messages and calls as a key offering. While Telegram doesn't officially have a ‘disappearing message' feature like WhatsApp it still is possible to send disappearing messages using the secret chat functionality. In this paper we analyse and evaluate ‘disappearing messages' across Telegram and Snapchat to see whether they can be forensically preserved and/or recovered across iOS and Android operating systems. As these messages could be vital to investigations, with potential evidence and intelligence stored on them, not to mention the limited timeframe in which they are ‘viewable' to the user, it is a great opportunity for Digital Forensics to understand how they are stored, managed, and ‘deleted' compared to traditional messages on the same platforms/applications.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Subjects:	Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA76 Computer software
Divisions:	Computer Science and Mathematics
Publisher:	AIS
Date of acceptance:	7 August 2022
Date of first compliant Open Access:	3 February 2023
Date Deposited:	08 Nov 2022 12:08
Last Modified:	03 Feb 2023 13:04
URI:	https://ljmu-9.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/18062

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