Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

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 …

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 …

A Framework To Reveal Clandestine Organ Trafficking In The Dark Web And Beyond, Michael P. Heinl, Bo Yu, Duminda Wijesekera

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Due to the scarcity of transplantable organs, patients have to wait on long lists for many years to get a matching kidney. This scarcity has created an illicit market place for wealthy recipients to avoid long waiting times. Brokers arrange such organ transplants and collect most of the payment that is sometimes channeled to fund other illicit activities. In order to collect and disburse payments, they often resort to money laundering-like schemes of money transfers. As the low-cost Internet arrives in some of the affected countries, social media and the dark web are used to illegally trade human organs. This …

Russia Today, Cyberterrorists Tomorrow: U.S. Failure To Prepare Democracy For Cyberspace, Jonathan F. Lancelot

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

This paper is designed to expose vulnerabilities within the US electoral system, the use of cyberspace to exploit weaknesses within the information assurance strategies of the democratic and republican party organizations, and deficiencies within the social media communications and voting machine exploits. A brief history of discriminatory practices in voting rights and voting access will be set as the foundation for the argument that the system is vulnerable in the cyber age, and the need for reform at the local, state and national levels will be emphasized. The possibility of a foreign nation-state influencing the outcome of an election by …

A Bit Like Cash: Understanding Cash-For-Bitcoin Transactions Through Individual Vendors, Stephanie J. Robberson, Mark R. Mccoy

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

As technology improves and economies become more globalized, the concept of currency has evolved. Bitcoin, a cryptographic digital currency, has been embraced as a secure and convenient type of money. Due to its security and privacy for the user, Bitcoin is a good tool for conducting criminal trades. The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) has regulations in place to make identification information of Bitcoin purchasers accessible to law enforcement, but enforcing these rules with cash-for-Bitcoin traders is difficult. This study surveyed cash-for-Bitcoin vendors in Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico to determine personal demographic information, knowledge of …

Automated Man-In-The-Middle Attack Against Wi‑Fi Networks, Martin Vondráček, Jan Pluskal, Ondřej Ryšavý

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Currently used wireless communication technologies suffer security weaknesses that can be exploited allowing to eavesdrop or to spoof network communication. In this paper, we present a practical tool that can automate the attack on wireless security. The developed package called wifimitm provides functionality for the automation of MitM attacks in the wireless environment. The package combines several existing tools and attack strategies to bypass the wireless security mechanisms, such as WEP, WPA, and WPS. The presented tool can be integrated into a solution for automated penetration testing. Also, a popularization of the fact that such attacks can be easily automated …

Digital Forensic Readiness In Organizations: Issues And Challenges, Nickson Menza Karie, Simon Maina Karume Dr.

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

With the evolution in digital technologies, organizations have been forced to change the way they plan, develop, and enact their information technology strategies. This is because modern digital technologies do not only present new opportunities to business organizations but also a different set of issues and challenges that need to be resolved. With the rising threats of cybercrimes, for example, which have been accelerated by the emergence of new digital technologies, many organizations as well as law enforcement agencies globally are now erecting proactive measures as a way to increase their ability to respond to security incidents as well as …

Legislative Requirements For Cyber Peacekeeping, Nikolay Akatyev, Joshua I. James

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Cyber Peacekeeping strives for the prevention, mitigation and cessation of cyber and physical conflicts. The creation of a Cyber Peacekeeping organization, however, has major legal and political implications. In this work we review current international legislation applicable for functions of Cyber Peacekeeping. Specifically, we analyze prominent works which contribute to definitions, law and ethics regulating cyber conflicts from the perspective of the creation of a CPK organization. Legislative and terminological foundations are analyzed and adopted from current practice. Further, this work analyzes guiding principles of global organizations such as ITU IMPACT, INTERPOL and regional organizations such as NATO and the …

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 …

A Forensic Email Analysis Tool Using Dynamic Visualization, Johannes Stadlinger, Andreas Dewald

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Communication between people counts to the most important information of today’s business. As a result, in case of forensic investigations in big companies, analysis of communication data in general and especially email, as the still most widely used business communication platform with an immense and still growing volume, is a typical task in digital forensics. One of the challenges is to identify the relevant communication partners and structures in the suspects surrounding as quickly as possible in order to react appropriately and identify further targets of evaluation. Due to the amount of emails in typical inboxes, reading through all the …

Find Me If You Can: Mobile Gps Mapping Applications Forensic Analysis & Snavp The Open Source, Modular, Extensible Parser, Jason Moore, Ibrahim Baggili, Frank Breitinger

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The use of smartphones as navigation devices has become more prevalent. The ubiquity of hand-held navigation devices such as Garmins or Toms Toms has been falling whereas the ownership of smartphones and their adoption as GPS devices is growing. This work provides a comprehensive study of the most popular smartphone mapping applications, namely Google Maps, Apple Maps, Waze, MapQuest, Bing, and Scout, on both Android and iOS. It details what data was found, where it was found, and how it was acquired for each application. Based on the findings, the work allowed for the construction of a tool capable of …

Compression Of Virtual-Machine Memory In Dynamic Malware Analysis, James E. Fowler Ph.D.

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Lossless compression of memory dumps from virtual machines that run malware samples is considered with the goal of significantly reducing archival costs in dynamic-malware-analysis applications. Given that, in such dynamic-analysis scenarios, malware samples are typically run in virtual machines just long enough to activate any self-decryption or other detection- avoidance maneuvers, the virtual-machine memory typically changes little from that of the baseline state, with the difference being attributable in large degree to the loading of additional executables and libraries. Consequently, delta coding is proposed to compress the current virtual-machine memory dump by coding its differences with respect to a predicted …

Table Of Contents

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Front Matter

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Special Issue Of Best Papers From The 11th International Conference On Systematic Approaches To Digital Forensic Engineering (Sadfe 2016)

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The SADFE series feature the different editions of the International Conference on Systematic Approaches to Digital Forensics Engineering. Now in its eleventh edition, SADFE has established itself as the premier conference for researchers and practitioners working in Systematic Approaches to Digital Forensics Engineering.

SADFE 2016, the eleventh international conference on Systematic Approaches to Digital Forensic Engineering was held in Kyoto, Japan, September 20 - 22, 2016.

Digital forensics engineering and the curation of digital collections in cultural institutions face pressing and overlapping challenges related to provenance, chain of custody, authenticity, integrity, and identity. The generation, analysis and sustainability of digital …

Bloom Filters Optimized Wu-Manber For Intrusion Detection, Monther Aldwairi, Koloud Al-Khamaiseh, Fatima Alharbi, Babar Shah

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

With increasing number and severity of attacks, monitoring ingress and egress network traffic is becoming essential everyday task. Intrusion detection systems are the main tools for capturing and searching network traffic for potential harm. Signature-based intrusion detection systems are the most widely used, and they simply use a pattern matching algorithms to locate attack signatures in intercepted network traffic. Pattern matching algorithms are very expensive in terms of running time and memory usage, leaving intrusion detection systems unable to detect attacks in real-time. We propose a Bloom filters optimized Wu-Manber pattern matching algorithm to speed up intrusion detection. The Bloom …

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 …

Leveraging The Windows Amcache.Hve File In Forensic Investigations, Bhupendra Singh, Upasna Singh

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The Amcache.hve is a registry hive file that is created by Microsoft® Windows® to store the information related to execution of programs. This paper highlights the evidential potential of Amcache.hve file and its application in the area of user activity analysis. The study uncovers numerous artifacts retained in Amcache.hve file when a user performs certain actions such as running host-based applications, installation of new applications, or running portable applications from external devices. The results of experiments demonstrate that Amcache.hve file stores intriguing artifacts related to applications such as timestamps of creation and last modification of any application; name, description, publisher …

The 2016 Analysis Of Information Remaining On Computer Hard Disks Offered For Sale On The Second Hand Market In The Uae, Thomas Martin, Andy Jones, Mohammed Alzaabi

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

This research describes our survey of data remaining on computer hard disks sold on the second hand market in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). This is a repetition of the first survey conducted in 2012 (Jones, Martin, & Alzaabi, 2012). Similar studies have been carried over the last ten years in the United Kingdom, Australia, USA, Germany and France: (Jones, Mee, Meyler, & Gooch, 2005), (Jones, Valli, Sutherland, & Thomas, 2006), (Jones, Valli, Dardick, & Sutherland, 2008), (Jones, Valli, Dardick, & Sutherland, 2009). This research was undertaken to gain insight into the volumes of data found on second-hand disks purchased …

A New Distributed Chinese Wall Security Policy Model, Saad Fehis, Omar Nouali, Mohand-Tahar Kechadi

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The application of the Chinese wall security policy model (CWSPM) to control the information flows between two or more competing and/or conflicting companies in cloud computing (Multi-tenancy) or in the social network, is a very interesting solution. The main goal of the Chinese Wall Security Policy is to build a wall between the datasets of competing companies, and among the system subjects. This is done by the applying to the subjects mandatory rules, in order to control the information flow caused between them. This problem is one of the hottest topics in the area of cloud computing (as a distributed …

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.

A Survey Of Social Network Forensics, Umit Karabiyik, Muhammed Abdullah Canbaz, Ahmet Aksoy, Tayfun Tuna, Esra Akbas, Bilal Gonen, Ramazan S. Aygun

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Social networks in any form, specifically online social networks (OSNs), are becoming a part of our everyday life in this new millennium especially with the advanced and simple communication technologies through easily accessible devices such as smartphones and tablets. The data generated through the use of these technologies need to be analyzed for forensic purposes when criminal and terrorist activities are involved. In order to deal with the forensic implications of social networks, current research on both digital forensics and social networks need to be incorporated and understood. This will help digital forensics investigators to predict, detect and even prevent …

Table Of Contents

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

A Legal Examination Of Revenge Pornography And Cyber-Harassment, Thomas Lonardo, Tricia Martland, Doug White

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

This paper examines the current state of the statutes in the United States as they relate to cyber-harassment in the context of "revenge porn". Revenge porn refers to websites which cater to those wishing to exploit, harass, or otherwise antagonize their ex partners using pornographic images and videos which were obtained during their relationships. The paper provide examples and illustrations as well as a summary of current statute in the United States. The paper additionally explores some of the various legal remedies available to victims of revenge pornography.

Special Issue On Cyberharassment Investigation: Advances And Trends, Joanne Bryce, Virginia N. L. Franqueira, Andrew Marrington

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Empirical and anecdotal evidence indicates that cyberharassment is more prevalent as the use of social media becomes increasingly widespread, making geography and physical proximity irrelevant. Cyberharassment can take different forms (e.g., cyberbullying, cyberstalking, cybertrolling), and be motivated by the objectives of inflicting distress, exercising control, impersonation, and defamation. Little is currently known about the modus operandi of offenders and their psychological characteristics. Investigation of these behaviours is particularly challenging because it involves digital evidence distributed across the devices of both alleged offenders and victims, as well as online service providers, sometimes over an extended period of time. This special issue …

Differentiating Cyberbullies And Internet Trolls By Personality Characteristics And Self-Esteem, Lauren A. Zezulka, Kathryn C. Seigfried-Spellar

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Cyberbullying and internet trolling are both forms of online aggression or cyberharassment; however, research has yet to assess the prevalence of these behaviors in relationship to one another. In addition, the current study was the first to investigate whether individual differences and self-esteem discerned between self-reported cyberbullies and/or internet trolls (i.e., Never engaged in either, Cyberbully-only, Troll-only, Both Cyberbully and Troll). Of 308 respondents solicited from Mechanical Turk, 70 engaged in cyberbullying behaviors, 20 engaged in only trolling behaviors, 129 self-reported both behaviors, and 89 self-reported neither behavior. Results yielded low self-esteem, low conscientiousness, and low internal moral values for …

The Impact Of Low Self-Control On Online Harassment: Interaction With Opportunity., Hyunin Baek, Michael M. Losavio, George E. Higgins

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Developing Internet technology has increased the rates of youth online harassment. This study examines online harassment from adolescents with low self-control and the moderating effect of opportunity. The data used in this study were collected by the Korea Institute of Criminology in 2009. The total sample size was 1,091. The results indicated that low self-control, opportunity, and gender have a significant influence on online harassment. However, these results differed according to gender; for males, low self-control significantly impacted online harassment; for females, however, only low self-control significantly impacted online harassment. Furthermore, the interaction between low self-control and opportunity did not …

Toward Online Linguistic Surveillance Of Threatening Messages, Brian H. Spitzberg, Jean Mark Gawron

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Threats are communicative acts, but it is not always obvious what they communicate or when they communicate imminent credible and serious risk. This paper proposes a research- and theory-based set of over 20 potential linguistic risk indicators that may discriminate credible from non-credible threats within online threat message corpora. Two prongs are proposed: (1) Using expert and layperson ratings to validate subjective scales in relation to annotated known risk messages, and (2) Using the resulting annotated corpora for automated machine learning with computational linguistic analyses to classify non-threats, false threats, and credible threats. Rating scales are proposed, existing threat corpora …