Forensic Analysis of WhatsApp chat data

Due to the widespread use of mobile phones and wireless applications, there is unquestionably a surge in cybercrimes. As a result, there is an urgent need for mobile forensics. The investigators should decide one of the three gathering types—manual, logical, or physical—to use before starting an investigation. The existing mobile acquisition technologies exploit these in various ways to create images of all mobile content, files of particular data categories, or data from a particular application. The tool may capture more data than necessary, forcing researchers to individually filter data may, or it may obtain all of the data, but this does not help with the examination of instances involving a particular mobile application. Data from the application without adequate analysis both in instances need a lot of work and time. This study compares and analyses forensics presently accessible and gives a demonstrated view of available tools that can perform data extraction and forensic investigations on WhatsApp. This study also discusses the mechanism behind the messenger technology, protocols behind the technology, and different ways to extract the data from the mobile phone to perform forensic analysis. Additionally, this study focuses on the weak points of the tools technology and suggests better methods to improve the vast field of WhatsApp forensics.