Exploring Myths in Digital Forensics

2020 ◽  
pp. 1299-1308
Author(s):  
Gary C. Kessler ◽  
Gregory H. Carlton

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 to many digital forensic practice rituals.

Author(s):  
Gary C. Kessler ◽  
Gregory H. Carlton

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 to many digital forensic practice rituals.


Author(s):  
Gary C. Kessler ◽  
Gregory H. Carlton

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 to many digital forensic practice rituals.


Author(s):  
Gregory H. Carlton ◽  
Gary C. Kessler

The study and practice of forensic science comprises many distinct areas that range from behavioral to biological to physical and to digital matters, and in each area forensic science is utilized to obtain evidence that will be admissible within the legal framework. This article focuses on inconsistencies within the accepted methodology of digital forensics when comparing the current best practices of mobile digital devices and traditional computer devices. Here the authors raise the awareness of this disconnect in methodology, and they posit that some specific tasks within the traditional best practices of digital forensic science are artifacts of ritual rather than based on scientific requirements.


2020 ◽  
pp. 593-596
Author(s):  
Gregory H. Carlton ◽  
Gary C. Kessler

The study and practice of forensic science comprises many distinct areas that range from behavioral to biological to physical and to digital matters, and in each area forensic science is utilized to obtain evidence that will be admissible within the legal framework. This article focuses on inconsistencies within the accepted methodology of digital forensics when comparing the current best practices of mobile digital devices and traditional computer devices. Here the authors raise the awareness of this disconnect in methodology, and they posit that some specific tasks within the traditional best practices of digital forensic science are artifacts of ritual rather than based on scientific requirements.


Author(s):  
Gregory H. Carlton ◽  
Gary C. Kessler

The study and practice of forensic science comprises many distinct areas that range from behavioral to biological to physical and to digital matters, and in each area forensic science is utilized to obtain evidence that will be admissible within the legal framework. This article focuses on inconsistencies within the accepted methodology of digital forensics when comparing the current best practices of mobile digital devices and traditional computer devices. Here the authors raise the awareness of this disconnect in methodology, and they posit that some specific tasks within the traditional best practices of digital forensic science are artifacts of ritual rather than based on scientific requirements.


Data ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (8) ◽  
pp. 87
Author(s):  
Sara Ferreira ◽  
Mário Antunes ◽  
Manuel E. Correia

Deepfake and manipulated digital photos and videos are being increasingly used in a myriad of cybercrimes. Ransomware, the dissemination of fake news, and digital kidnapping-related crimes are the most recurrent, in which tampered multimedia content has been the primordial disseminating vehicle. Digital forensic analysis tools are being widely used by criminal investigations to automate the identification of digital evidence in seized electronic equipment. The number of files to be processed and the complexity of the crimes under analysis have highlighted the need to employ efficient digital forensics techniques grounded on state-of-the-art technologies. Machine Learning (ML) researchers have been challenged to apply techniques and methods to improve the automatic detection of manipulated multimedia content. However, the implementation of such methods have not yet been massively incorporated into digital forensic tools, mostly due to the lack of realistic and well-structured datasets of photos and videos. The diversity and richness of the datasets are crucial to benchmark the ML models and to evaluate their appropriateness to be applied in real-world digital forensics applications. An example is the development of third-party modules for the widely used Autopsy digital forensic application. This paper presents a dataset obtained by extracting a set of simple features from genuine and manipulated photos and videos, which are part of state-of-the-art existing datasets. The resulting dataset is balanced, and each entry comprises a label and a vector of numeric values corresponding to the features extracted through a Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT). The dataset is available in a GitHub repository, and the total amount of photos and video frames is 40,588 and 12,400, respectively. The dataset was validated and benchmarked with deep learning Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Support Vector Machines (SVM) methods; however, a plethora of other existing ones can be applied. Generically, the results show a better F1-score for CNN when comparing with SVM, both for photos and videos processing. CNN achieved an F1-score of 0.9968 and 0.8415 for photos and videos, respectively. Regarding SVM, the results obtained with 5-fold cross-validation are 0.9953 and 0.7955, respectively, for photos and videos processing. A set of methods written in Python is available for the researchers, namely to preprocess and extract the features from the original photos and videos files and to build the training and testing sets. Additional methods are also available to convert the original PKL files into CSV and TXT, which gives more flexibility for the ML researchers to use the dataset on existing ML frameworks and tools.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (7) ◽  
pp. 162 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nikolaos Serketzis ◽  
Vasilios Katos ◽  
Christos Ilioudis ◽  
Dimitrios Baltatzis ◽  
Georgios Pangalos

The complication of information technology and the proliferation of heterogeneous security devices that produce increased volumes of data coupled with the ever-changing threat landscape challenges have an adverse impact on the efficiency of information security controls and digital forensics, as well as incident response approaches. Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI)and forensic preparedness are the two parts of the so-called managed security services that defendants can employ to repel, mitigate or investigate security incidents. Despite their success, there is no known effort that has combined these two approaches to enhance Digital Forensic Readiness (DFR) and thus decrease the time and cost of incident response and investigation. This paper builds upon and extends a DFR model that utilises actionable CTI to improve the maturity levels of DFR. The effectiveness and applicability of this model are evaluated through a series of experiments that employ malware-related network data simulating real-world attack scenarios. To this extent, the model manages to identify the root causes of information security incidents with high accuracy (90.73%), precision (96.17%) and recall (93.61%), while managing to decrease significantly the volume of data digital forensic investigators need to examine. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it indicates that CTI can be employed by digital forensics processes. Second, it demonstrates and evaluates an efficient mechanism that enhances operational DFR.


2012 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 28-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Grispos ◽  
Tim Storer ◽  
William Bradley Glisson

Cloud computing is a rapidly evolving information technology (IT) phenomenon. Rather than procure, deploy, and manage a physical IT infrastructure to host their software applications, organizations are increasingly deploying their infrastructure into remote, virtualized environments, often hosted and managed by third parties. This development has significant implications for digital forensic investigators, equipment vendors, law enforcement, as well as corporate compliance and audit departments, amongst other organizations. Much of digital forensic practice assumes careful control and management of IT assets (particularly data storage) during the conduct of an investigation. This paper summarises the key aspects of cloud computing and analyses how established digital forensic procedures will be invalidated in this new environment, as well as discussing and identifying several new research challenges addressing this changing context.


2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 25-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Regner Sabillon ◽  
Jordi Serra-Ruiz ◽  
Victor Cavaller ◽  
Jeimy J. Cano

This paper reviews the existing methodologies and best practices for digital investigations phases like collecting, evaluating and preserving digital forensic evidence and chain of custody of cybercrimes. Cybercriminals are adopting new strategies to launch cyberattacks within modified and ever changing digital ecosystems, this article proposes that digital investigations must continually readapt to tackle cybercrimes and prosecute cybercriminals, working in international collaboration networks, sharing prevention knowledge and lessons learned. The authors also introduce a compact cyber forensics model for diverse technological ecosystems called Cyber Forensics Model in Digital Ecosystems (CFMDE). Transferring the knowledge, international collaboration, best practices and adopting new digital forensic tools, methodologies and techniques will be hereinafter paramount to obtain digital evidence, enforce organizational cybersecurity policies, mitigate security threats, fight anti-forensics practices and indict cybercriminals. The global Digital Forensics community ought to constantly update current practices to deal with cybercriminality and foreseeing how to prepare to new technological environments where change is always constant.


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