Computer Law Commons^™

On The Network Performance Of Digital Evidence Acquisition Of Small Scale Devices Over Public Networks, Irvin Homem, Spyridon Dosis

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

While cybercrime proliferates – becoming more complex and surreptitious on the Internet – the tools and techniques used in performing digital investigations are still largely lagging behind, effectively slowing down law enforcement agencies at large. Real-time remote acquisition of digital evidence over the Internet is still an elusive ideal in the combat against cybercrime. In this paper we briefly describe the architecture of a comprehensive proactive digital investigation system that is termed as the Live Evidence Information Aggregator (LEIA). This system aims at collecting digital evidence from potentially any device in real time over the Internet. Particular focus is made …

A Review Of Recent Case Law Related To Digital Forensics: The Current Issues, Kelly A. Cole, Shruti Gupta, Dheeraj Gurugubelli, Marcus K. Rogers

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Digital forensics is a new field without established models of investigation. This study uses thematic analysis to explore the different issues seen in the prosecution of digital forensic investigations. The study looks at 100 cases from different federal appellate courts to analyze the cause of the appeal. The issues are categorized into one of four categories, ‘search and seizure’, ‘data analysis’, ‘presentation’ and ‘legal issues’. The majority of the cases reviewed related to the search and seizure activity.

Keywords: Computer Investigation, Case Law, Digital Forensics, Legal Issues, and Courts

A New Cyber Forensic Philosophy For Digital Watermarks In The Context Of Copyright Laws, Vinod P. Bhattathiripad, Sneha Sudhakaran, Roshna K. Thalayaniyil

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The objective of this paper is to propose a new cyber forensic philosophy for watermark in the context of copyright laws for the benefit of the forensic community and the judiciary worldwide. The paper first briefly introduces various types of watermarks, and then situates watermarks in the context of the ideaexpression dichotomy and the copyright laws. It then explains the forensic importance of watermarks and proposes a forensic philosophy for them in the context of copyright laws. Finally, the paper stresses the vital need to incorporate watermarks in the forensic tests to establish software copyright infringement and also urges the …

A Survey Of Software-Based String Matching Algorithms For Forensic Analysis, Yi-Ching Liao

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Employing a fast string matching algorithm is essential for minimizing the overhead of extracting structured files from a raw disk image. In this paper, we summarize the concept, implementation, and main features of ten software-based string matching algorithms, and evaluate their applicability for forensic analysis. We provide comparisons between the selected software-based string matching algorithms from the perspective of forensic analysis by conducting their performance evaluation for file carving. According to the experimental results, the Shift-Or algorithm (R. Baeza-Yates & Gonnet, 1992) and the Karp-Rabin algorithm (Karp & Rabin, 1987) have the minimized search time for identifying the locations of …

Investigating Forensics Values Of Windows Jump Lists Data, Ahmad Ghafarian

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Starting with Windows 7, Microsoft introduced a new feature to the Windows Operating Systems called Jump Lists. Jump Lists stores information about user activities on the host machine. These activities may include links to the recently visited web pages, applications executed, or files processed. Computer forensics investigators may find traces of misuse in Jump Lists auto saved files. In this research, we investigate the forensics values of Jump Lists data. Specifically, we use several tools to view Jump Lists data on a virtual machine. We show that each tool reveal certain types of information about user’s activity on the host …

An Empirical Comparison Of Widely Adopted Hash Functions In Digital Forensics: Does The Programming Language And Operating System Make A Difference?, Satyendra Gurjar, Ibrahim Baggili, Frank Breitinger, Alice Fischer

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Hash functions are widespread in computer sciences and have a wide range of applications such as ensuring integrity in cryptographic protocols, structuring database entries (hash tables) or identifying known files in forensic investigations. Besides their cryptographic requirements, a fundamental property of hash functions is efficient and easy computation which is especially important in digital forensics due to the large amount of data that needs to be processed when working on cases. In this paper, we correlate the runtime efficiency of common hashing algorithms (MD5, SHA-family) and their implementation. Our empirical comparison focuses on C-OpenSSL, Python, Ruby, Java on Windows and …

Two Challenges Of Stealthy Hypervisors Detection: Time Cheating And Data Fluctuations, Igor Korkin

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Hardware virtualization technologies play a significant role in cyber security. On the one hand these technologies enhance security levels, by designing a trusted operating system. On the other hand these technologies can be taken up into modern malware which is rather hard to detect. None of the existing methods is able to efficiently detect a hypervisor in the face of countermeasures such as time cheating, temporary self-uninstalling, memory hiding etc. New hypervisor detection methods which will be described in this paper can detect a hypervisor under these countermeasures and even count several nested ones. These novel approaches rely on the …

Masthead

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Back Matter

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Front Matter

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Table Of Contents

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

From The Editor-In-Chief, Ibrahim Baggili

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Welcome to JDFSL’s second issue for 2015! First, I would like to thank our editorial board, reviewers, and the JDFSL team for bringing this issue to life. In this issue, we continue our multidisciplinary tradition. The first paper, Two challenges of stealthy hypervisors detection: time cheating and data fluctuations, showcases an important contribution to the computing discipline. The use of virtualization has dramatically increased given our strong reliance on cloud services both private and public. Even though hypervisors enhance security, they can also be exploited by malware. Therefore, this paper is of importance given that it introduces a novel method …

From The Editor-In-Chief, Ibrahim Baggili

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Welcome to JDFSL’s first issue for 2015! First, I would like to thank our editorial board, reviewers, and the JDFSL team for bringing this issue to life. It has been a big year for JDFSL as the journal continues to progress. We are continuing our indexing efforts for the journal and we are getting closer with some of the major databases.

Litigation Holds: Past, Present, And Future Directions, Milton Luoma, Vicki M. Luoma

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Electronically Stored Information (ESI) first became a serious litigation issue in the late 1990s, and the first attempts to determine best practices did not occur until the early 2000s. As best practices developed, the litigation hold to prevent routine destruction of documents and to preserve documents relevant to litigation came into existence. The duty to preserve ESI is triggered when litigation is reasonably anticipated. All information that relates to potential litigation must be preserved from the time it becomes reasonably apparent that litigation is possible until the expiration of the statute of limitations. If steps are not taken to properly …

To License Or Not To License Reexamined: An Updated Report On State Statutes Regarding Private Investigators And Digital Examiners, Thomas Lonardo, Alan Rea, Doug White

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

In this update to the 2012 year's study, the authors examine statutes that regulate, license, and enforce investigative functions in each US state. As before, the authors find that very few state statutes explicitly differentiate between Private Investigators and Digital Examiners. There is a small trend in which some states are changing definitions or moving to exempt DE from PI licensing requirements. However, we look at some additional information in terms of practicing attorney exemptions that may cloud the licensing waters.

As with the previous research studies (Lonardo et al., 2008, 2009, 2012) the authors contacted all state regulatory agencies …

Table Of Contents

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Open Forensic Devices, Lee Tobin, Pavel Gladyshev

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Cybercrime has been a growing concern for the past two decades. What used to be the responsibility of specialist national police has become routine work for regional and district police. Unfortunately, funding for law enforcement agencies is not growing as fast as the amount of digital evidence. In this paper, we present a forensic platform that is tailored for cost effectiveness, extensibility, and ease of use. The software for this platform is open source and can be deployed on practically all commercially available hardware devices such as standard desktop motherboards or embedded systems such as Raspberry Pi and Gizmosphere’s Gizmo …

The Use Of Ontologies In Forensic Analysis Of Smartphone Content, Mohammed Alzaabi, Thomas A. Martin, Kamal Taha, Andy Jones

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Digital forensics investigators face a constant challenge in keeping track with evolving technologies such as smartphones. Analyzing the contents of these devices to infer useful information is becoming more time consuming as the volume and complexity of data are increasing. Typically, such analysis is undertaken by a human, which makes it dependent on the experience of the investigator. To overcome such impediments, an automated technique can be utilized in order to aid the investigator to quickly and eciently analyze the data.In this paper, we propose F-DOS; a set of ontologies that models the smartphone content for the purpose of forensic …

Table Of Contents

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

A 3-D Stability Analysis Of Lee Harvey Oswald In The Backyard Photo, Srivamshi Pittala, Emily Whiting, Hany Farid

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Fifty years have passed since the assassination of U.S. President Kennedy. Despite the long passage of time, it is still argued that the famous backyard photo of Oswald, holding the same type of rifle used to assassinate the President, is a fake. These claims include, among others, that Oswald’s pose in the photo is physically implausible. We describe a detailed 3-D stability analysis to determine if this claim is warranted.

Table Of Contents

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Project Maelstrom: Forensic Analysis Of The Bittorrent-Powered Browser, Jason Farina, M-Tahar Kechadi, Mark Scanlon

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

In April 2015, BitTorrent Inc. released their distributed peer-to-peer powered browser, Project Maelstrom, into public beta. The browser facilitates a new alternative website distribution paradigm to the traditional HTTP-based, client-server model. This decentralised web is powered by each of the visitors accessing each Maelstrom hosted website. Each user shares their copy of the website;s source code and multimedia content with new visitors. As a result, a Maelstrom hosted website cannot be taken offline by law enforcement or any other parties. Due to this open distribution model, a number of interesting censorship, security and privacy considerations are raised. This paper explores …

Robotics And The Lessons Of Cyberlaw, Ryan Calo

Articles

Two decades of analysis have produced a rich set of insights as to how the law should apply to the Internet’s peculiar characteristics. But, in the meantime, technology has not stood still. The same public and private institutions that developed the Internet, from the armed forces to search engines, have initiated a significant shift toward developing robotics and artificial intelligence.

This Article is the first to examine what the introduction of a new, equally transformative technology means for cyberlaw and policy. Robotics has a different set of essential qualities than the Internet and accordingly will raise distinct legal issues. Robotics …

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 …

Computer Forensic Projects For Accountants, Grover S. Kearns

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Digital attacks on organizations are becoming more common and more sophisticated. Firms are interested in providing data security and having an effective means to respond to attacks. Accountants possess important investigative and analytical skills that serve to uncover fraud in forensic investigations. Some accounting students take courses in forensic accounting but few colleges offer a course in computer forensics for accountants. Educators wishing to develop such a course may find developing the curriculum daunting. A major element of such a course is the use of forensic software. This paper argues the importance of computer forensics to accounting students and offers …

Data Loss Prevention Management And Control: Inside Activity Incident Monitoring, Identification, And Tracking In Healthcare Enterprise Environments, Manghui Tu, Kimberly Spoa-Harty, Liangliang Xiao

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

As healthcare data are pushed online, consumers have raised big concerns on the breach of their personal information. Law and regulations have placed businesses and public organizations under obligations to take actions to prevent data breach. Among various threats, insider threats have been identified to be a major threat on data loss. Thus, effective mechanisms to control insider threats on data loss are urgently needed. The objective of this research is to address data loss prevention challenges in healthcare enterprise environment. First, a novel approach is provided to model internal threat, specifically inside activities. With inside activities modeling, data …

Rules Of Professional Responsibility In Digital Forensics: A Comparative Analysis, Filipo Sharevski

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The consolidation of the rules of professional responsibility as recommended by the Committee on Identifying the Needs of Forensic Sciences Community (2009) accents the establishment of an uniform code of ethics emphasizing the importance of enforceability in strengthening the role the forensic science plays within the criminal justice system. Equally pertinent for the domain of digital forensics, this imperative entails a research commitment in comparing and contrasting the respective codes of ethics to illustrate their “variety, specificity and enforceability” in order to inform the discussion on the regulative aspects of the digital forensic discipline. Accordingly, this paper reviews the professional …

On The Network Performance Of Digital Evidence Acquisition Of Small Scale Devices Over Public Networks, Irvin Homem, Spyridon Dosis

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

While cybercrime proliferates – becoming more complex and surreptitious on the Internet – the tools and techniques used in performing digital investigations are still largely lagging behind, effectively slowing down law enforcement agencies at large. Real-time remote acquisition of digital evidence over the Internet is still an elusive ideal in the combat against cybercrime. In this paper we briefly describe the architecture of a comprehensive proactive digital investigation system that is termed as the Live Evidence Information Aggregator (LEIA). This system aims at collecting digital evidence from potentially any device in real time over the Internet. Particular focus is made …

The "Bring Your Own Device" Conundrum For Organizations And Investigators: An Examination Of The Policy And Legal Concerns In Light Of Investigatory Challenges, Carla J. Utter, Alan Rea

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

In recent years, with the expansion of technology and the desire to downsize costs within the corporate culture, the technology trend has steered towards the integration of personally owned mobile devices (i.e. smartphones) within the corporate and enterprise environment. The movement, known as “Bring Your Own Device” (hereinafter referred to as “BYOD”), seeks to minimize or eliminate the need for two separate and distinct mobile devices for one employee. While taken at face value this trend seems favorable, the corporate policy and legal implications of the implementation of BYOD are further complicated by significant investigatory issues that far outweigh the …

Plc Forensics Based On Control Program Logic Change Detection, Ken Yau, Kam-Pui Chow

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system is an industrial control automated system. It is built with multiple Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs). PLC is a special form of microprocessor-based controller with proprietary operating system. Due to the unique architecture of PLC, traditional digital forensic tools are difficult to be applied. In this paper, we propose a program called Control Program Logic Change Detector (CPLCD), it works with a set of Detection Rules (DRs) to detect and record undesired incidents on interfering normal operations of PLC. In order to prove the feasibility of our solution, we set up two experiments for …