Skype Forensics in Android Devices

The discipline of smartphone forensics has recently got more attention because of the tremendous growth in the smartphones market. Smartphones, to some extent, have similar capabilities to that of PCs. They can store large amount of data and divergent categories of information. Among other mobile platforms, Android-based devices are getting more popularity. Variety of mobile Applications (Apps) are increasingly developed to mainly extend the functionally of the phones. The usage of Voice over IP (VoIP) Apps has explosively increased for their wide availability and cheap prices. As Skype is one of the most popular VoIP Apps, in this paper we investigate the artifacts of Skype calls and chats in the Android devices. We inspect both the RAM and NAND flash memories in different scenarios and time durations. Even though Skype provides secure communications over the Internet, this paper shows that Skype call and chat evidences can be truly found in the devices. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to investigate Skype in the Android devices.