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

Fabian Nunes, Patrício Domingues () and Miguel Frade
Additional contact information
Fabian Nunes: School of Technology and Management, Polytechnic Institute of Leiria, Morro do Lena—Alto do Vieiro, 2411-901 Leiria, Portugal
Patrício Domingues: School of Technology and Management, Polytechnic Institute of Leiria, Morro do Lena—Alto do Vieiro, 2411-901 Leiria, Portugal
Miguel Frade: School of Technology and Management, Polytechnic Institute of Leiria, Morro do Lena—Alto do Vieiro, 2411-901 Leiria, Portugal

Future Internet, 2024, vol. 16, issue 9, 1-23

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.

Keywords: Adidas Running; Android; DFIR; MapMyWalk; Nike Run Club; Pumatrac; Asics Runkeeper; Strava; ALEAPP (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/16/9/304/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/16/9/304/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jftint:v:16:y:2024:i:9:p:304-:d:1462407

Access Statistics for this article

Future Internet is currently edited by Ms. Grace You

More articles in Future Internet from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().