The Digital Footprints on the Run: A Forensic Examination of Android Running Workout Applications

Abstract

This study applies a forensic examination to six distinct Android fitness applications centered around monitoring running activities. The applications are Adidas Running, MapMyWalk, Nike Run Club, Pumatrac, Runkeeper and Strava. Specifically, we perform a post mortem analysis of each application to find and document artifacts such as timelines and Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates of running workouts that could prove helpful in digital forensic investigations. 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 Android Logs Events And Protobuf Parser (ALEAPP) digital forensic framework. These modules process the data sources, creating reports with the primary digital artifacts, which include the workout activities and related GPS data.