Other Computer Sciences Commons^™

Analysis Of Windows 8 Registry Artifacts, Jeremy M. Stormo

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Microsoft’s series of Windows operating systems represents some of the most commonly encountered technologies in the field of digital forensics. It is then fair to say that Microsoft’s design decisions greatly affect forensic efforts. Because of this, it is exceptionally important for the forensics community to keep abreast of new developments in the Windows product line. With each new release, the Windows operating system may present investigators with significant new artifacts to explore. Described by some as the heart of the Windows operating system, the Windows registry has been proven to contain many of these forensically interesting artifacts. Given the …

Curated Reasoning By Formal Modeling Of Provenance, Kevin B. Shaw

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The core problem addressed in this research is the current lack of an ability to repurpose and curate scientific data among interdisciplinary scientists within a research enterprise environment. Explosive growth in sensor technology as well as the cost of collecting ocean data and airborne measurements has allowed for exponential increases in scientific data collection as well as substantial enterprise resources required for data collection. There is currently no framework for efficiently curating this scientific data for repurposing or intergenerational use.

There are several reasons why this problem has eluded solution to date to include the competitive requirements for funding and …

Categorization Of Large Corpora Of Malicious Software, Deekshit Kura

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Malware is computer software written by someone with mischievous or, more usually, malicious and/or criminal intent and specifically designed to damage data, hosts or networks. The variety of malware is increasing proportionally with the increase in computers and we are not aware of newly emerging malware. Tools are needed to categorize families of malware, so that analysts can compare new malware samples to ones that have been previously analyzed and determine steps to detect and prevent malware infections.

In this thesis, I developed a technique to catalog and characterize the behavior of malware, so that malware families, the level of …

Forensic Analysis Of Whatsapp On Android Smartphones, Neha S. Thakur

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Android forensics has evolved over time offering significant opportunities and exciting challenges. On one hand, being an open source platform Android is giving developers the freedom to contribute to the rapid growth of the Android market whereas on the other hand Android users may not be aware of the security and privacy implications of installing these applications on their phones. Users may assume that a password-locked device protects their personal information, but applications may retain private information on devices, in ways that users might not anticipate. In this thesis we will be concentrating on one such application called 'WhatsApp', a …

Automated Timeline Anomaly Detection, Joshua M. Barone

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Digital forensics is the practice of trained investigators gathering and analyzing evidence from digital devices such as computers and smart phones. On these digital devices, it is possible to change the time on the device for a purpose other than what is intended. Currently there are no documented techniques to determine when this occurs. This research seeks to prove out a technique for determining when the time has been changed on forensic disk image by analyzing the log files found on the image. Out of this research a tool is created to perform this analysis in automated fashion. This tool …