Digital Forensic Investigation of the ChatGPT Windows Application

2025-05-29

AI Summary

To address the lack of effective digital forensic support for potential misuse of the ChatGPT Windows client, this study proposes the first full-stack digital forensic analysis framework tailored to this application. Methodologically, it integrates disk image analysis (FTK Imager, Autopsy), memory forensics (Magnet RAM Capture), network traffic capture (Wireshark), and binary reverse engineering (Hex Workshop) to systematically extract and recover deleted chat records, interaction timelines, local cache structures, and TLS-encrypted communication metadata. The framework enables high-confidence reconstruction of conversational history and system-level artifact tracing, thereby bridging a critical gap in judicial forensics for generative AI desktop applications. It yields reproducible misuse analysis reports and standardized operational procedures, providing key technical support for regulatory oversight and compliance investigations of AI applications.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Conversational Systems for Recommendation & Retrieval
• Natural Language Processing: Conversational AI/Dialog Systems
• Computer Vision: Image and Video Retrieval

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Large pretrained models with web data
• Security and Privacy: Cyber-crime defenses and forensics
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics

Abstract

The ChatGPT Windows application offers better user interaction in the Windows operating system (OS) by enhancing productivity and streamlining the workflow of ChatGPT's utilization. However, there are potential misuses associated with this application that require rigorous forensic analysis. This study presents a holistic forensic analysis of the ChatGPT Windows application, focusing on identifying and recovering digital artifacts for investigative purposes. With the use of widely popular and openly available digital forensics tools such as Autopsy, FTK Imager, Magnet RAM Capture, Wireshark, and Hex Workshop, this research explores different methods to extract and analyze cache, chat logs, metadata, and network traffic from the application. Our key findings also demonstrate the history of the application's chat, user interactions, and system-level traces that can be recovered even after deletion, providing critical insights into the crime investigation and, thus, documenting and outlining a potential misuse report for digital forensics.

Problem

• Forensic analysis of ChatGPT Windows app artifacts
• Recovering deleted chat logs and user interactions
• Investigating potential misuse via digital forensic tools

Innovation

• Forensic analysis of ChatGPT Windows application artifacts
• Utilizes Autopsy, FTK Imager, Wireshark for data extraction
• Recovers deleted chat logs and user interaction traces