Identification of source mobile hand sets using audio latency feature.

Area of Science:

• Digital Forensics
• Mobile Device Analysis
• Audio Engineering

Background:

• Legal requirements necessitate verifying the source of digital audio recordings.
• Mobile phones are common recording devices, making source identification crucial.
• Audio latency is a potential, unexplored feature for device attribution.

Purpose of the Study:

• To determine if audio latency can identify the specific mobile phone source of a digital audio recording.
• To evaluate the robustness of audio latency as a forensic feature across different mobile phone models and audio formats.

Main Methods:

• Conducted experiments using 300 audio recordings from ten different MOTOROLA mobile phone models.
• Recorded audio in three formats (3gp, wav, m4a) at 16 kHz stereo using the EASY VOICE RECORDER application.
• Analyzed audio latency using Adobe Audition 3.0 software.

Main Results:

• Audio latency analysis revealed specific, distinguishing features for mobile handsets.
• Latency characteristics were found to be consistent within the same manufacturer but varied across different models.
• The study demonstrated that audio latency is a robust indicator for establishing the source of digital audio recordings.

Conclusions:

• Mobile phone audio latency is a reliable forensic characteristic for source attribution.
• This technique can be applied to identify the specific device used for digital audio recording.
• The findings support the use of audio latency in digital audio forensics for legal and investigative purposes.