Social Snapshots: Digital Forensics for Online Social Networks

Final pdf 1,011KB

Presentation pdf 815KB

Markus Huber
SBA Research
Austria

Martin Mulazzani
SBA Research
Austria

Gilbert Wondracek
Vienna University of Technology
Austria

Sebastian Schrittwieser
SBA Research
Austria

Edgar Weippl
SBA Research
Austria

Manuel Leithner
SBA Research
Austria

Abstract:
Recently, academia and law enforcement alike have shown a strong demand for data that is collected from online social networks. In this work, we present a novel method for harvesting such data from social networking websites. Our approach uses a hybrid system that is based on a custom add-on for social networks in combination with a web crawling component. The datasets that our tool collects contain profile information (user data, private messages, photos, etc.) and associated meta-data (internal timestamps and unique identifiers). These social snapshots are significant for security research and in the field of digital forensics. We implemented a prototype for Facebook and evaluated our system on a number of human volunteers. We show the feasibility and efficiency of our approach and its advantages in contrast to traditional techniques that rely on application-specific web crawling and parsing. Furthermore, we investigate different use-cases of our tool that include consensual application and the use of sniffed authentication cookies. Finally, we contribute to the research community by publishing our implementation as an open-source project.