Digital forensic analysis of mobile automotive maintenance applications

Mobile applications regarding automotive maintenance have gained popularity among many automobile users. These applications may store digital forensics artifacts about the mechanics and movements of the vehicles such as GPS coordinates, vehicle health reports, or speed values which can be valuable for investigating a broad category of cases such as traffic incidents, insurance disputes, or criminal offenses. This study presents the forensics artifacts that can be identified in three automobile maintenance apps and provides guidance about the required technical procedures for the extraction and analysis of these artifacts. On the other hand, although increased utilization of mobile and IoT technologies creates additional opportunities for collecting more artifacts as evidenced in this study, they will cause more burden on the backlogs of forensic labs. This study also proposes a guideline about how to align manual and logical extraction procedures with the digital forensics life-cycle that includes the triage and other follow-up steps.