Highlighting Relationships of a Smartphone's Social Ecosystem in Potentially Large Investigations

Andriotis, Panagiotis; Oikonomou, George; Tryfonas, Theo; Li, Shancang

Abstract

© 2013 IEEE. Social media networks are becoming increasingly popular because they can satisfy diverse needs of individuals (both personal and professional). Modern mobile devices are empowered with increased capabilities, taking advantage of the technological progress that makes them smarter than their predecessors. Thus, a smartphone user is not only the phone owner, but also an entity that may have different facets and roles in various social media networks. We believe that these roles can be aggregated in a single social ecosystem, which can be derived by the smartphone. In this paper, we present our concept of the social ecosystem in contemporary devices and we attempt to distinguish the different communities that occur from the integration of social networking in our lives. In addition, we propose techniques to highlight major actors within the ecosystem. Moreover, we demonstrate our suggested visualization scheme, which illustrates the linking of entities that live in separate communities using data taken from the smartphone. Finally, we extend our concept to include various parallel ecosystems during potentially large investigations and we link influential entities in a vertical fashion. We particularly examine cases where data aggregation is performed by specific applications, producing volumes of textual data that can be analyzed with text mining methods. Our analysis demonstrates the risks of the rising 'bring your own device' trend in enterprise environments.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Aug 25, 2015
• Online Publication Date: Aug 25, 2015
• Publication Date: Sep 1, 2016
• Journal: IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics
• Print ISSN: 2168-2267
• Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 46
• Issue: 9
• Pages: 1974-1985
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/TCYB.2015.2454733
• Keywords: bring your own device (BYOD), digital forensics, enterprise mobility management, entity linking, network analysis, sentiment analysis, ecosystems, media, databases, social network services, forensics, data visualization , joining processes
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/916404
• Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TCYB.2015.2454733