Shopping While Watching: An Updated Forensic Analysis of TikTok on Android and iOS

TikTok is one of the most popular social media platforms in the world. Despite its extensive use, mobile forensics research on TikTok has seen little progress in the past two years, possibly due to limitations faced by some researchers using this app. This paper presents a forensic analysis of TikTok, focusing on recent inadequacies in mobile forensic research on it, especially with the advent of features like the TikTok Shop. This study not only describes the forensic value of the new shopping feature, but also updates artifacts from previous studies on general information and media sections, providing investigators with information about TikTok-related folder structures and important data paths. For general information, we extracted data about user accounts and apps, and for media information, we found video content uploaded and viewed by users, and proposed possible methods to distinguish what users actually watched. This work improves the understanding of the digital environment and offers valuable forensic insights crucial to keeping up with rapid technological advancements in social media platforms for digital forensic investigations.