WhatsApp collects phone numbers, duration of calls and other information, as researchers from the University of New Haven determined. WhatsApp, the popular chat app in the world and has over 800 million users worldwide.
Last year it was acquired by Facebook for $ 19 billion. Due to the acquisition by the social network and the large number of users, according to the researchers, is important to know how the network protocol of WhatsApp works and what forensically relevant data it contains. For the study, the researchers decided to unravel the connection between the WhatsApp program and the WhatsApp servers.
Through the network traffic, the researchers were able to identify various data, such as WhatsApp phone numbers, metadata about the call set-up and the duration of the call. They also discovered the codec used WhatsApp for calls, as well as the IP addresses of the relay servers which run the WhatsApp conversations.
"Our research shows which data can be gathered through forensic examination of WhatsApp and provides a way for others to conduct additional research on network forensics messaging apps," said researcher Ibrahim Baggili. The researchers note that decrypting the network traffic was not easy. For this it is necessary to have access to both the data on the device as the entire network traffic. The research of the researchers: "WhatsApp Network Forensics: Decrypting and Understanding WhatsApp Call Signaling Messages" is published in the journal Digital Investigation.
No comments:
Post a Comment