A Study on the Forensic Analysis of Airlines Applications on Android Operating System

Airline mobile applications store a lot of sensitive data in mobile devices such as users’ Personal Identifiable Information (PII) and credit/debit card details. In this paper, we have forensically acquired and analyzed the device-stored data remnants from five airline applications running on the Android operating system. For all five applications, we designed and conducted a set of activities. From the acquired physical image of a rooted Android testing device, we were able to extract and examine data artifacts left in the root folder. This study has revealed that sensitive information can still be extracted from mobile devices even after the applications have been deleted which reflects poor implementation of security and privacy measures employed in these applications. This major technical flaw poses a serious vulnerability and a risk to user privacy. On the other hand, this data may be used for evidence-collection purposes by digital forensics practitioners. This study can be used by mobile application developers to mitigate these vulnerabilities to make the applications risk-averse and secure.