The Digital Footprints on the Run: A Forensic Examination of Android Running Workout Applications
This study applies a forensic examination to six distinct Android fitness applications centred around monitoring running activities. The applications are Adidas Running, Map My Walk, Nike Run Club, Pumatrac, Runkeeper and Strava. Specifically, we perform a post-mortem analysis of each application to find and document artifacts that could prove helpful in digital forensic analysis. First, we focused on the Nike Run Club application and used the gained knowledge to analyze the other applications, taking advantage of their similarity. We began by creating a test environment and using each application during a fixed period. This procedure allowed us to gather testing data, and to ensure access to all data generated by the apps, we used a rooted Android smartphone. For the forensic analysis, we examined the data stored by the smartphone application and documented the forensic artifacts found. To ease forensic data processing, we created several Python modules for the well-known digital forensic framework ALEAPP. These modules process the data sources, creating reports with the primary digital artifacts, which include the workout activities and related GPS Data.