Authors: Elénore Ryser and David-Olivier Jaquet-Chiffelle
DFRWS USA 2021
Abstract
After a decade of technological development, digital forensic science faces major pressures to provide investigative results with scientific rigor (Casey, 2019). There is a growing concern coming from the judicial community regarding digitals traces and its interpretation (Casey, 2018, Gavin 2017, Sorenson 2019, O’Connor, 2020). This ongoing study is focusing on the value of the geolocation information carried by the metadata of pictures taken using a mobile phone. To study the variability of the accuracy of the geolocation metadata and to see if any influences from external environment could be spotted, pictures were taken in 19 locations distributed across 3 different paths. The pictures were taken using two Samsung Galaxy S8 SM-G950F on Android 8.0. Different configurations of GNSS, Wi-Fi and mobile network connections were also tested and their potential influence on the accuracy of the geolocation metadata studied. The results of this study showed that locations could be distributed in 4 categories: locations with low variability in measurements, with high variability, without any geolocation data available and finally locations with high horizontal errors.