Computer Law Commons^™

An Ml Based Digital Forensics Software For Triage Analysis Through Face Recognition, Gaurav Gogia, Parag H. Rughani

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Since the past few years, the complexity and heterogeneity of digital crimes has increased exponentially, which has made the digital evidence & digital forensics paramount for both criminal investigation and civil litigation cases. Some of the routine digital forensic analysis tasks are cumbersome and can increase the number of pending cases especially when there is a shortage of domain experts. While the work is not very complex, the sheer scale can be taxing. With the current scenarios and future predictions, crimes are only going to become more complex and the precedent of collecting and examining digital evidence is only going …

Technical Behaviours Of Child Sexual Exploitation Material Offenders, Chad Steel, Emily Newman, Suzanne O'Rourke, Ethel Quayle

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

An exploration of the technological behaviours of previously convicted child sexual exploitation material (CSEM) offenders provides a foundation for future applied research into deterrence, investigation, and treatment efforts. This study evaluates the technology choices and transitions of individuals previously convicted of CSEM offenses. Based on their inclusion in two sex offender registries, anonymous survey results (n=78) were collected from English-speaking adults within the United States. CSEM offenders chose technologies based on both utility and perceived risk; peer-to-peer and web-browsers were the most common gateway technologies and showed substantial sustained usage; a substantial minority of users never stored CSEM and only …

Forensic Discoverability Of Ios Vault Applications, Alissa Gilbert, Kathryn C. Seigfried-Spellar

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Vault Applications are used to store potentially sensitive information on a smartphone; and are available on Android and iOS. The purpose of using these applications could be used to hide potential evidence or illicit photos. After comparing five different iOS photo vaults, each vault left evidence and photos behind. However, of the three forensic toolkits used, each produced different results in their scans of the phone. The media left behind was due to the photo vaults not protecting their information as claimed, and using basic obfuscation techniques in place of security controls. Future research will look at how newer security …

Social Media User Relationship Framework (Smurf), Anne David, Sarah Morris, Gareth Appleby-Thomas

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The use of social media has spread through many aspects of society, allowing millions of individuals, corporate as well as government entities to leverage the opportunities it affords. These opportunities often end up being exploited by a small percentage of the user community who use it for objectionable or unlawful activities; for example, trolling, cyber bullying, grooming, luring. In some cases, these unlawful activities result in investigations where swift retrieval of critical evidence required in order to save a life.

This paper presents a proof of concept (PoC) framework for social media user attribution. The framework aims to provide digital …

Towards Increasing Trust In Expert Evidence Derived From Malware Forensic Tools, Ian M. Kennedy, Blaine Price, Arosha Bandara

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Following a series of high profile miscarriages of justice in the UK linked to questionable expert evidence, the post of the Forensic Science Regulator was created in 2008. The main objective of this role is to improve the standard of practitioner competences and forensic procedures. One of the key strategies deployed to achieve this is the push to incorporate a greater level of scientific conduct in the various fields of forensic practice. Currently there is no statutory requirement for practitioners to become accredited to continue working with the Criminal Justice System of England and Wales. However, the Forensic Science Regulator …

A Two-Stage Model For Social Network Investigations In Digital Forensics, Anne David, Sarah Morris, Gareth Appleby-Thomas

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

This paper proposes a two-stage model for identifying and contextualizing features from artefacts created as a result of social networking activity. This technique can be useful in digital investigations and is based on understanding and the deconstruction of the processes that take place prior to, during and after user activity; this includes corroborating artefacts. Digital Investigations are becoming more complex due to factors such as, the volume of data to be examined; different data formats; a wide range of sources for digital evidence; the volatility of data and the limitations of some of the standard digital forensic tools. This paper …

Fast Forensic Triage Using Centralised Thumbnail Caches On Windows Operating Systems, Sean Mckeown, Gordon Russell, Petra Leimich

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

A common investigative task is to identify known contraband images on a device, which typically involves calculating cryptographic hashes for all the files on a disk and checking these against a database of known contraband. However, modern drives are now so large that it can take several hours just to read this data from the disk, and can contribute to the large investigative backlogs suffered by many law enforcement bodies. Digital forensic triage techniques may thus be used to prioritise evidence and effect faster investigation turnarounds. This paper proposes a new forensic triage method for investigating disk evidence relating to …

Enhancement Of Media Splicing Detection: A General Framework, Songpon Teerakanok, Tetsutaro Uehara

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Digital media (i.e., image, audio) has played an influential role in today information system. The increasing of popularity in digital media has brought forth many technological advancements. The advancements, however, also gives birth to a number of forgeries and attacks against this type of information. With the availability of easy-to-use media manipulating tools available online, the authenticity of today digital media cannot be guaranteed. In this paper, a new general framework for enhancing today media splicing detection has been proposed. By combining results from two traditional approaches, the enhanced detection results show improvement in term of clarity in which anomalies …

Drone Forensic Analysis Using Open Source Tools, M A Hannan Bin Azhar, Thomas Edward Allen Barton, Tasmina Islam

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Carrying capabilities of drones and their easy accessibility to public have led to an increase in crimes committed using drones in recent years. For this reason, the need for forensic analysis of drones captured from the crime scenes and the devices used for these drones is also paramount. This paper presents the extraction and identification of important artefacts from the recorded flight data as well as the associated mobile devices using open source tools and some basic scripts developed to aid the analysis of two popular drone systems- the DJI Phantom 3 Professional and Parrot AR. Drone 2.0. Although different …

Varying Instructional Approaches To Physical Extraction Of Mobile Device Memory, Joan Runs Through, Gary D. Cantrell

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Digital forensics is a multidisciplinary field encompassing both computer science and criminal justice. This action research compared demonstrated skill levels of university students enrolled in a semester course in small device forensics with 54 hours of instruction in mobile forensics with an emphasis on physical techniques such as JTAG and Chip-Off extraction against the skill levels of industry professionals who have completed an accelerated 40 hour advanced mobile forensics training covering much of the same material to include JTAG and Chip-Off extraction. Participant backgrounds were also examined to determine if those participants with a background in computer science had an …

Public Security & Digital Forensics In The United States: The Continued Need For Expanded Digital Systems For Security, Deborah G. Keeling, Michael Losavio

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Digital Forensics is one of the latest challenges for the use of forensics in the investigative process in the United States. Some of the challenges are created by conditions and circumstances present for law enforcement around the world. However, many are unique to the United States and created by the standards of evidence within our courts, nature of our law enforcement organizations, and structure of our judicial and prosecutorial systems. It is essential for the preservation of public security and individual safety that competent systems of digital forensics are developed for law enforcement at all levels. The failure to do …

File Type Identification - Computational Intelligence For Digital Forensics, Konstantinos Karampidis, Giorgos Papadourakis

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

In modern world, the use of digital devices for leisure or professional reasons is growing quickly; nevertheless, criminals try to fool authorities and hide evidence in a computer by changing the file type. File type detection is a very demanding task for a digital forensic examiner. In this paper, a new methodology is proposed – in a digital forensics perspective- to identify altered file types with high accuracy by employing computational intelligence techniques. The proposed methodology is applied to the three most common image file types (jpg, png and gif) as well as to uncompressed tiff images. A three-stage process …

The Impact Of Md5 File Hash Collisions On Digital Forensic Imaging, Gary C. Kessler

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The Message Digest 5 (MD5) hash is commonly used as for integrity verification in the forensic imaging process. The ability to force MD5 hash collisions has been a reality for more than a decade, although there is a general consensus that hash collisions are of minimal impact to the practice of computer forensics. This paper describes an experiment to determine the results of imaging two disks that are identical except for one file, the two versions of which have different content but otherwise occupy the same byte positions on the disk, are the same size, and have the same hash …

The Impact Of Sha-1 File Hash Collisions On Digital Forensic Imaging: A Follow-Up Experiment, Gary C. Kessler

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

A previous paper described an experiment showing that Message Digest 5 (MD5) hash collisions of files have no impact on integrity verification in the forensic imaging process. This paper describes a similar experiment applied when two files have a Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA-1) collision.

Book Review: Digital Crime And Forensic Science In Cyberspace, Gary C. Kessler

Gary C. Kessler

This document is Dr. Kessler's review of Digital Crime and Forensic Science in Cyberspace, by P. Kanellis, E. Kiountouzis, N. Kolokotronis, and D. Martakos. Idea Group Publishing, 2006. ISBN: 1-59140-873-3.

On Efficiency Of Distributed Password Recovery, Radek Hranický, Martin Holkovič, Petr Matoušek

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

One of the major challenges in digital forensics today is data encryption. Due to the leaked information about unlawful sniffing, many users decided to protect their data by encryption. In case of criminal activities, forensic experts are challenged how to decipher suspect's data that are subject to investigation. A common method how to overcome password-based protection is a brute force password recovery using GPU-accelerated hardware. This approach seems to be expensive. This paper presents an alternative approach using task distribution based on BOINC platform. The cost, time and energy efficiency of this approach is discussed and compared to the GPU-based …

An Automated Approach For Digital Forensic Analysis Of Heterogeneous Big Data, Hussam Mohammed, Nathan Clarke, Fudong Li

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The major challenges with big data examination and analysis are volume, complex interdependence across content, and heterogeneity. The examination and analysis phases are considered essential to a digital forensics process. However, traditional techniques for the forensic investigation use one or more forensic tools to examine and analyse each resource. In addition, when multiple resources are included in one case, there is an inability to cross-correlate findings which often leads to inefficiencies in processing and identifying evidence. Furthermore, most current forensics tools cannot cope with large volumes of data. This paper develops a novel framework for digital forensic analysis of heterogeneous …

Making Sense Of Email Addresses On Drives, Neil C. Rowe, Riqui Schwamm, Michael R. Mccarrin, Ralucca Gera

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Drives found during investigations often have useful information in the form of email addresses which can be acquired by search in the raw drive data independent of the file system. Using this data we can build a picture of the social networks that a drive owner participated in, even perhaps better than investigating their online profiles maintained by social-networking services because drives contain much data that users have not approved for public display. However, many addresses found on drives are not forensically interesting, such as sales and support links. We developed a program to filter these out using a Naïve …

Identification And Exploitation Of Inadvertent Spectral Artifacts In Digital Audio, N. C. Donnangelo, W. S. Kuklinski, R. Szabo, R. A. Coury, G. R. Hamshar

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

We show that modulation products from local oscillators in a variety of commercial camcorders are coupled into the recorded audio track, creating narrow band time invariant spectral features. These spectral features, left largely intact by transcoding, compression and other forms of audiovisual post processing, can encode characteristics of specific camcorders used to capture the audio files, including the make and model. Using data sets both downloaded from YouTube and collected under controlled laboratory conditions we demonstrate an average probability of detection (Pd) approaching 0.95 for identification of a specific camcorder in a population of thousands of similar recordings, with a …

Factors Influencing Digital Forensic Investigations: Empirical Evaluation Of 12 Years Of Dubai Police Cases, Ibtesam Alawadhi, Janet C. Read, Andrew Marrington, Virginia N. L. Franqueira

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

In Digital Forensics, the number of person-hours spent on investigation is a key factor which needs to be kept to a minimum whilst also paying close attention to the authenticity of the evidence. The literature describes challenges behind increasing person-hours and identifies several factors which contribute to this phenomenon. This paper reviews these factors and demonstrates that they do not wholly account for increases in investigation time. Using real case records from the Dubai Police, an extensive study explains the contribution of other factors to the increase in person-hours. We conclude this work by emphasizing on several factors affecting the …

Are Mobile Device Examinations Practiced Like 'Forensics'?, Gary Kessler

Publications

"Mobile device forensics is sometimes disparaged as not really being ‘forensics.’ This paper discusses the relationship between digital forensics and other forensic sciences, and the relationship of mobile device forensics to the broader field of digital forensics. It specifically addresses the question of whether mobile device forensics processes – and practices – rise to the level of suitable forensics quality."

Using Internet Artifacts To Profile A Child Pornography Suspect, Marcus K. Rogers, Kathryn C. Seigfried-Spellar

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Digital evidence plays a crucial role in child pornography investigations. However, in the following case study, the authors argue that the behavioral analysis or “profiling” of digital evidence can also play a vital role in child pornography investigations. The following case study assessed the Internet Browsing History (Internet Explorer Bookmarks, Mozilla Bookmarks, and Mozilla History) from a suspected child pornography user’s computer. The suspect in this case claimed to be conducting an ad hoc law enforcement investigation. After the URLs were classified (Neutral; Adult Porn; Child Porn; Adult Dating sites; Pictures from Social Networking Profiles; Chat Sessions; Bestiality; Data Cleaning; …

Exploring Forensic Implications Of The Fusion Drive, Shruti Gupta, Marcus Rogers

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

This paper explores the forensic implications of Apple’s Fusion Drive. The Fusion Drive is an example of auto-tiered storage. It uses a combination of a flash drive and a magnetic drive. Data is moved between the drives automatically to maximize system performance. This is different from traditional caches because data is moved and not simply copied. The research included understanding the drive structure, populating the drive, and then accessing data in a controlled setting to observe data migration strategies. It was observed that all the data is first written to the flash drive with 4 GB of free space always …

An Efficient Similarity Digests Database Lookup – A Logarithmic Divide & Conquer Approach, Frank Breitinger, Christian Rathgeb, Harald Baier

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Investigating seized devices within digital forensics represents a challenging task due to the increasing amount of data. Common procedures utilize automated file identification, which reduces the amount of data an investigator has to examine manually. In the past years the research field of approximate matching arises to detect similar data. However, if n denotes the number of similarity digests in a database, then the lookup for a single similarity digest is of complexity of O(n). This paper presents a concept to extend existing approximate matching algorithms, which reduces the lookup complexity from O(n) to O(log(n)). Our proposed approach is based …

Testing Framework For Mobile Device Forensics Tools, Maxwell Anobah, Shahzad Saleem, Oliver Popov

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The proliferation of mobile communication and computing devices, in particular smart mobile phones, is almost paralleled with the increasing number of mobile device forensics tools in the market. Each mobile forensics tool vendor, on one hand claims to have a tool that is best in terms of performance, while on the other hand each tool vendor seems to be using different standards for testing their tools and thereby defining what support means differently. To overcome this problem, a testing framework based on a series of tests ranging from basic forensics tasks such as file system reconstruction up to more complex …

Quantifying Relevance Of Mobile Digital Evidence As They Relate To Case Types: A Survey And A Guide For Best Practice, Shahzad Saleem, Ibrahim Baggili, Oliver Popov

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

In this work, a survey was conducted to help quantify the relevance of nineteen types of evidence (such as SMS) to seven types of digital investigations associated with mobile devices (MD) (such as child pornography). 97 % of the respondents agreed that every type of digital evidence has a different level of relevance to further or solve a particular investigation. From 55 serious participants, a dataset of 5,772 responses regarding the relevance of nineteen types of digital evidence for all the seven types of digital investigations was obtained. The results showed that (i) SMS belongs to the most relevant type …

A State-Of-The-Art Review Of Cloud Forensics, Sameera Almulla, Youssef Iraqi, Andrew Jones

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Cloud computing and digital forensics are emerging fields of technology. Unlike traditional digital forensics where the target environment can be almost completely isolated, acquired and can be under the investigators control; in cloud environments, the distribution of computation and storage poses unique and complex challenges to the investigators. Recently, the term “cloud forensics” has an increasing presence in the field of digital forensics. In this state-of-the-art review, we included the most recent research efforts that used “cloud forensics” as a keyword and then classify the literature into three dimensions: (1) survey-based, (2) technology-based and (3) forensics-procedural-based. We discuss widely accepted …

Audit: Automated Disk Investigation Toolkit, Umit Karabiyik, Sudhir Aggarwal

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Software tools designed for disk analysis play a critical role today in forensics investigations. However, these digital forensics tools are often difficult to use, usually task specific, and generally require professionally trained users with IT backgrounds. The relevant tools are also often open source requiring additional technical knowledge and proper configuration. This makes it difficult for investigators without some computer science background to easily conduct the needed disk analysis. In this paper, we present AUDIT, a novel automated disk investigation toolkit that supports investigations conducted by non-expert (in IT and disk technology) and expert investigators. Our proof of concept design …

A Study Of Forensic Imaging In The Absence Of Write-Blockers, Gary C. Kessler, Gregory H. Carlton

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Best practices in digital forensics demand the use of write-blockers when creating forensic images of digital media, and this has been a core tenet of computer forensics training for decades. The practice is so ingrained that the integrity of images created without a write-blocker are immediately suspect. This paper describes a research framework that compares forensic images acquired with and without utilizing write-blockers in order to understand the extent of the differences, if any, in the resultant forensic copies. We specifically address whether differences are superficial or evidentiary, and we discuss the impact of admitting evidence acquired without write blocking. …

Information Security Challenge Of Qr Codes, Nik Thompson, Kevin Lee

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The discipline of information security must adapt to new technologies and methods of interaction with those technologies. New technologies present both challenges and opportunities for the security professional, especially for areas such as digital forensics. Challenges can be in the form of new devices such as smartphones or new methods of sharing information, such as social networks. One such rapidly emerging interaction technology is the use of Quick Response (QR) codes. These offer a physical mechanism for quick access to Web sites for advertising and social interaction. This paper argues that the common implementation of QR codes potentially presents security …