Primary Investigator:
Umit Karabiyik

Project Members
Yufeng Gong; Yujin Lee; Umit Karabiyik

Privacy-oriented messaging applications have gained increasing attention due to their focus on anonymity, metadata minimization, and decentralized communication architectures. While these design goals enhance privacy protections, they may also significantly impact the availability of digital artifacts during forensic investigations. As these privacy-preserving instant messaging apps continue to gain adoption, investigators may increasingly encounter them in criminal cases which will incur important questions about the recoverability of evidence artifacts on mobile devices. In our work, platforms such as SimpleX Chat, Session, and Threema were selected as widely used applications representing distinct privacy-preserving architectures. The study examines whether common user activities leave recoverable artifacts on mobile devices and evaluates the level of forensic visibility these privacy-focused platforms provide to digital forensic investigations. The findings will provide insights into the availability of forensic artifacts in privacy-oriented messaging applications and their implications for digital forensic investigations.