Researchers have created a taxonomy to assist forensic research on data stored in cloud apps on Android-based mobile devices. This interesting information came to us from The Stack in their article, “Data forensics for cloud storage applications.”

The importance of data retrieval from phones and tablets is become increasing relevant to law enforcement officials, who must follow evidentiary procedures to ensure that relevant data is retrieved properly. The taxonomy created by the researchers in the UK reflects residual data found in 31 separate cloud applications, to aid officials in correlating evidence of user activities with the data retrieved from the device. Even when data has been deleted and the tablet memory wiped, they are still able to retrieve certain types of data from the device, depending on the cloud application used.

The plan is to expand the study of cloud storage application forensics to other types of operating systems and different mobile devices.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in taxonomies, metadata, and semantic enrichment to make your content findable.