Understanding Digital Forensic Characteristics of Smart Speaker Ecosystems

With a built-in intelligent personal voice assistant providing Q&A services, smart speaker ecosystems combine multiple compatible components, including the internet of things (IoT) technology, mobile devices, and cloud computing. However, as it is closely related to people's daily lives, security and privacy issues have gained worldwide attention. Components in the ecosystem are interconnected and chained together to enable the ecosystem to perform increasingly diverse operations. By collecting meaningful data from smart speaker ecosystems, we can reconstruct user behavior and provide a holistic explanation for finding the root cause of an observable symptom. This highlights the need for digital forensic research to enhance the security and privacy of smart speaker ecosystems. In this paper, we first discuss the digital forensic characteristics of a smart speaker ecosystem. Then, we propose a proof-of-concept digital forensic tool based on data provenance, that supports the identification, acquisition, and analysis of client-side artifacts from local devices.