Forensics Analysis of Privacy of Portable Web Browsers

Abstract

Web browser vendors offer a portable web browser option which is considered as one of the features that provides user privacy. Portable web browser is a browser that can be launched from a USB flash drive without the need for its installation on the host machine. Most popular web browsers have portable versions of their browsers as well. Portable web browsing poses a great challenge to computer forensic investigators who try to reconstruct the past browsing history, in case of any computer incidence. This research examines various sources in the host machine such as physical memory, temporary, recent, event files, Windows Registry, and Cache.dll files for the evidential information regarding portable browsing session. The portable browsers under this study include Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera. Results of this experiment show that portable web browsers do not provide user-privacy as they are expected to do. Keywords: computer forensics tools, RAM forensics, volatile memory, forensics artifacts, Registr