Discord Server Forensics: Analysis and Extraction of Digital Evidence

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Source of Publication

2021 11th IFIP International Conference on New Technologies, Mobility and Security (NTMS)

Publication Date

4-21-2021

Abstract

In recent years we can observe that digital forensics is being applied to a variety of domains as nearly any data can become valuable forensic evidence. The sheer scope of web-based investigations provides a vast amount of information. Due to a rapid increase in the number of cybercrimes the importance of application-specific forensics is greater than ever. Criminals use the application not only to communicate but also to facilitate crimes. It came to our attention that the gaming chat application Discord is one of them. Discord allows its users to send text messages as well as exchange image, video, and audio files. While Discord’s community is not as large as that of the most popular messaging apps the stable growth of its userbase and recent incidents indicate that it is used by criminals. This paper presents our research into the digital forensic analysis of Discord client-side artefacts and presents experimental development of a tool for extraction, analysis, and presentation of the data from Discord application. The work then proposes a solution in form of a tool, ‘DiscFor’, that can retrieve information from the application’s local files and cache storage.

ISBN

978-1-6654-4399-9

ISSN

2157-4960

Publisher

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)

Disciplines

Computer Sciences

Keywords

Digital forensics, Tools, Cache storage, Servers, Security, Data mining, Computer crime

Scopus ID

85107350593

Indexed in Scopus

yes

Open Access

yes

Open Access Type

Green: A manuscript of this publication is openly available in a repository

Link to Full Text

Share

COinS