Forensic Science and Technology Commons^™

Exploring Digital Evidence With Graph Theory, Imani Palmer, Boris Gelfand, Roy Campbell

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The analysis phase of the digital forensic process is the most complex. The analysis phase remains very subjective to the views of the forensic practitioner. There are many tools dedicated to assisting the investigator during the analysis process. However, they do not address the challenges. Digital forensics is in need of a consistent approach to procure the most judicious conclusions from the digital evidence. The objective of this paper is to discuss the ability of graph theory, a study of related mathematical structures, to aid in the analysis phase of the digital forensic process. We develop a graph-based representation of …

Case Study: A New Method For Investigating Crimes Against Children, Hallstein Asheim Hansen, Stig Andersen, Stefan Axelsson, Svein Hopland

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Investigations of crimes against children are often complex, both in terms of the varied and large amount of digital technology encountered and the offensive nature of the crimes. Such cases are numerous, large, and prioritised, requiring digital forensics competence. Earlier digital forensics was considered and treated as a typical forensic science like fingerprint analysis, performed in a laboratory isolated from the investigative team. This decoupled way of working has proved to be both inefficient and error prone.

At the Digital Forensic Unit of Oslo Police District we have developed a new way of working that addresses many of the problems …

Downstream Competence Challenges And Legal/Ethical Risks In Digital Forensics, Michael M. Losavio, Antonio Losavio

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Forensic practice is an inherently human-mediated system, from processing and collection of evidence to presentation and judgment. This requires attention to human factors and risks which can lead to incorrect judgments and unjust punishments.

For digital forensics, such challenges are magnified by the relative newness of the discipline and the use of electronic evidence in forensic proceedings. Traditional legal protections, rules of procedure and ethics rules mitigate these challenges. Application of those traditions better ensures forensic findings are reliable. This has significant consequences where findings may impact a person's liberty or property, a person's life or even the political direction …

Digital Forensics Tool Selection With Multi-Armed Bandit Problem, Umit Karabiyik, Tugba Karabiyik

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Digital forensics investigation is a long and tedious process for an investigator in general. There are many tools that investigators must consider, both proprietary and open source. Forensics investigators must choose the best tool available on the market for their cases to make sure they do not overlook any evidence resides in suspect device within a reasonable time frame. This is however hard decision to make, since learning and testing all available tools make their job only harder. In this project, we define the digital forensics tool selection for a specific investigative task as a multi-armed bandit problem assuming that …

Detecting Deception In Asynchronous Text, Fletcher Glancy

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Glancy and Yadav (2010) developed a computational fraud detection model (CFDM) that successfully detected financial reporting fraud in the text of the management’s discussion and analysis (MDA) portion of annual filings with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). This work extends the use of the CFDM to additional genres, demonstrates the generalizability of the CFDM and the use of text mining for quantitatively detecting deception in asynchronous text. It also demonstrates that writers committing fraud use words differently from truth tellers.

Understanding Deleted File Decay On Removable Media Using Differential Analysis, James H. Jones Jr, Anurag Srivastava, Josh Mosier, Connor Anderson, Seth Buenafe

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Digital content created by picture recording devices is often stored internally on the source device, on either embedded or removable media. Such storage media is typically limited in capacity and meant primarily for interim storage of the most recent image files, and these devices are frequently configured to delete older files as necessary to make room for new files. When investigations involve such devices and media, it is sometimes these older deleted files that would be of interest. It is an established fact that deleted file content may persist in part or in its entirety after deletion, and identifying the …

Development Of A Professional Code Of Ethics In Digital Forensics, Kathryn C. Seigfried-Spellar, Marcus Rogers, Danielle M. Crimmins 2184089

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Academics, government officials, and practitioners suggest the field of digital forensics is in need of a professional code of ethics. In response to this need, the authors developed and proposed a professional code of ethics in digital forensics. The current paper will discuss the process of developing the professional code of ethics, which included four sets of revisions based on feedback and suggestions provided by members of the digital forensic community. The final version of the Professional Code of Ethics in Digital Forensics includes eight statements, and we hope this is a step toward unifying the field of digital forensics …

Fast Filtering Of Known Png Files Using Early File Features, Sean Mckeown, Gordon Russell, Petra Leimich

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

A common task in digital forensics investigations is to identify known contraband images. This is typically achieved by calculating a cryptographic digest, using hashing algorithms such as SHA256, for each image on a given media, comparing individual digests with a database of known contraband. However, the large capacities of modern storage media, and increased time pressure on forensics examiners, necessitates that more efficient processing mechanisms be developed. This work describes a technique for creating signatures for images of the PNG format which only requires a tiny fraction of the file to effectively distinguish between a large number of images. Highly …

Detect Kernel-Mode Rootkits Via Real Time Logging & Controlling Memory Access, Satoshi Tanda, Irvin Homem, Igor Korkin

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Modern malware and spyware platforms attack existing antivirus solutions and even Microsoft PatchGuard. To protect users and business systems new technologies developed by Intel and AMD CPUs may be applied. To deal with the new malware we propose monitoring and controlling access to the memory in real time using Intel VT-x with EPT. We have checked this concept by developing MemoryMonRWX, which is a bare-metal hypervisor. MemoryMonRWX is able to track and trap all types of memory access: read, write, and execute. MemoryMonRWX also has the following competitive advantages: fine-grained analysis, support of multi-core CPUs and 64-bit Windows 10. MemoryMonRWX …

Harnessing Predictive Models For Assisting Network Forensic Investigations Of Dns Tunnels, Irvin Homem, Panagiotis Papapetrou

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

In recent times, DNS tunneling techniques have been used for malicious purposes, however network security mechanisms struggle to detect them. Network forensic analysis has been proven effective, but is slow and effort intensive as Network Forensics Analysis Tools struggle to deal with undocumented or new network tunneling techniques. In this paper, we present a machine learning approach, based on feature subsets of network traffic evidence, to aid forensic analysis through automating the inference of protocols carried within DNS tunneling techniques. We explore four network protocols, namely, HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, and POP3. Three features are extracted from the DNS tunneled traffic: …

An Accidental Discovery Of Iot Botnets And A Method For Investigating Them With A Custom Lua Dissector, Max Gannon, Gary Warner, Arsh Arora

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

This paper presents a case study that occurred while observing peer-to-peer network communications on a botnet monitoring station and shares how tools were developed to discover what ultimately was identified as Mirai and many related IoT DDOS Botnets. The paper explains how researchers developed a customized protocol dissector in Wireshark using the Lua coding language, and how this enabled them to quickly identify new DDOS variants over a five month period of study.

Kelihos Botnet: A Never-Ending Saga, Arsh Arora, Max Gannon, Gary Warner

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

This paper investigates the recent behavior of the Kelihos botnet, a spam-sending botnet that accounts for many millions of emails sent each day. The paper demonstrates how a team of students are able to perform a longitudinal malware study, making significant observations and contributions to the understanding of a major botnet using tools and techniques taught in the classroom. From this perspective the paper has two objectives: encouragement and observation. First, by providing insight into the methodology and tools used by student researchers to document and understand a botnet, the paper strives to embolden other academic programs to follow a …

Program And Proceedings: Nebraska Academy Of Sciences 1880–2017, 137th Anniversary Year, One Hundred-Twenty-Seventh Annual Meeting

Nebraska Academy of Sciences: Programs and Proceedings

Program

Aeronautics and Space Science

Chemistry and Physics

Collegiate Academy: Biology

Collegiate Academy: Chemistry and Physics

Biological and Medical Sciences

Aeronautics and Space Science: Poster Session

Applied Science and Technology

Maiben Memorial Lecture

Anthropology

Earth Science

Applied Science and Technology

Teaching of Science and Mathematics

Environmental Sciences

Friend of Science Award: Kacie Baum and Todd Young

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 …

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 …

Front Matter

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

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 …

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 …

Table Of Contents

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Drop (Drone Open Source Parser) Your Drone: Forensic Analysis Of The Dji Phantom Iii, Devon R. Clark, Christopher S. Meffert, Ibrahim Baggili, Frank Breitinger

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

The DJI Phantom III drone has already been used for malicious activities (to drop bombs, remote surveillance and plane watching) in 2016 and 2017. At the time of writing, DJI was the drone manufacturer with the largest market share. Our work presents the primary thorough forensic analysis of the DJI Phantom III drone, and the primary account for proprietary file structures stored by the examined drone. It also presents the forensically sound open source tool DRone Open source Parser (DROP) that parses proprietary DAT files extracted from the drone's nonvolatile internal storage. These DAT files are encrypted and encoded. The …

Approximate Bayesian Computation In Forensic Science, Jessie H. Hendricks

The Journal of Undergraduate Research

Forensic evidence is often an important factor in criminal investigations. Analyzing evidence in an objective way involves the use of statistics. However, many evidence types (i.e., glass fragments, fingerprints, shoe impressions) are very complex. This makes the use of statistical methods, such as model selection in Bayesian inference, extremely difficult.

Approximate Bayesian Computation is an algorithmic method in Bayesian analysis that can be used for model selection. It is especially useful because it can be used to assign a Bayes Factor without the need to directly evaluate the exact likelihood function - a difficult task for complex data. Several criticisms …

Availability Of Datasets For Digital Forensics–And What Is Missing, Cinthya Grajeda, Frank Breitinger, Ibrahim Baggili

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

This paper targets two main goals. First, we want to provide an overview of available datasets that can be used by researchers and where to find them. Second, we want to stress the importance of sharing datasets to allow researchers to replicate results and improve the state of the art. To answer the first goal, we analyzed 715 peer-reviewed research articles from 2010 to 2015 with focus and relevance to digital forensics to see what datasets are available and focused on three major aspects: (1) the origin of the dataset (e.g., real world vs. synthetic), (2) if datasets were released …

Leveraging The Srtp Protocol For Over-The-Network Memory Acquisition Of A Ge Fanuc Series 90-30, George Denton, Filip Karpisek, Frank Breitinger, Ibrahim Baggili

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) are common components implemented across many industries such as manufacturing, water management, travel, aerospace and hospitals to name a few. Given their broad deployment in critical systems, they became and still are a common target for cyber attacks; the most prominent one being Stuxnet. Often PLCs (especially older ones) are only protected by an outer line of defense (e.g., a firewall) but once an attacker gains access to the system or the network, there might not be any other defense layers. In this scenario, a forensic investigator should not rely on the existing software as it …

Exploring Myths In Digital Forensics: Separating Science From Ritual, Gary C. Kessler, Gregory H. Carlton

Publications

Digital forensic methodology deviates significantly relative to the methods of other forensic sciences for numerous practical reasons, and it has been largely influenced by factors derived from the inception and evolution of this relatively new and rapidly changing field. Digital forensics methodology was developed more by practitioners in its early days rather than by computer scientists. This led to accepted best practices in the field that may not represent the best or, at least, tested, science. This paper explores some of these differences in the practice and evolution between digital and other forensic sciences, and recommends scientific approaches to apply …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 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.

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 …