On the Development of New Forensic Tools for Detection of Human Skin Prints

The article reviews the main physical and physicochemical factors influencing the three-component system “fingerprint powder – prints bearing surface – sweat and grease print substance”. The authors propose new model compositions of fingerprint powders considering the reviewed common patterns: non-magnetic and luminescent magnetic. The features of prints bearing surfaces and developed fingerprint powders have been evaluated by applying electronic microscopy methods (scanning and probe microscopy). The authors have proven that the use of nano- and ultra disperse materials in the developed compositions (carbon nanotubes and shungite) enables to vary the sorption and adhesive capacity of fingerprint powders, which allows detecting fingerprints on varying surfaces with high selectivity toward the sweat and grease print substance and contrasting effect.

Forensic Tools for Species Identification of Skeletal Remains: Metrics, Statistics, and OsteoID

Although nonhuman remains constitute a significant portion of forensic anthropological casework, the potential use of bone metrics to assess the human origin and to classify species of skeletal remains has not been thoroughly investigated. This study aimed to assess the utility of quantitative methods in distinguishing human from nonhuman remains and present additional resources for species identification. Over 50,000 measurements were compiled from humans and 27 nonhuman (mostly North American) species. Decision trees developed from the long bone data can differentiate human from nonhuman remains with over 90% accuracy (>98% accuracy for the human sample), even if all long bones are pooled. Stepwise discriminant function results were slightly lower (>87.4% overall accuracy). The quantitative models can be used to support visual identifications or preliminarily assess forensic significance at scenes. For species classification, bone-specific discriminant functions returned accuracies between 77.7% and 89.1%, but classification results varied highly across species. From the study data, we developed a web tool, OsteoID, for users who can input measurements and be shown photographs of potential bones/species to aid in visual identification. OsteoID also includes supplementary images (e.g., 3D scans), creating an additional resource for forensic anthropologists and others involved in skeletal species identification and comparative osteology.

Urge for Novel and Secure Software Framework for Extraction and Decoding of Mobile Artifacts

Mobile Forensics is now days, increasingly becoming more challenging as it is the field of science that is continuously evolving with respect to the rapidly developing technologies and techniques for the extraction of the mobile data and its decoding. Majority of the crimes are getting committed digitally and especially the criminals are preferring mobile handsets than a laptop or desktop machines, leaving the footprints behind which could be evidence against them. The mobile handsets along with their software applications are getting more advanced and sophisticated mainly due to advances in Cloud computing where clouds are used to store data, Anti-forensics where efforts are made to defeat forensic procedures and Encryption which is used to secure the data during transit. But when compared with the pace of development in mobile hardware and software, the forensic tools and techniques are growing very slowly. Hence the contemporary forensic tools and methodologies are becoming increasingly obsolete and hence urges for the advanced forensic tools, methods which could comply with the need of today’s mobile forensics. Hence, this work presents a detailed survey of the contemporary challenges faced by the forensic experts with the current forensic tools and its methodologies and also the need, scope and opportunities associated with the novel and secure software framework that can address the majority of issues occurring while extraction and decoding of mobile artifacts.

Criminalistics and criminal politics

The article considers the question of the place and role of criminalistics in the implementation of the criminal policy of the state, examines the systemic relationship of criminalistics and criminal policy and the statements of individual criminologists about the need to form a forensic policy as an integral part of criminal policy are analyzed. The definition of the term «forensic policy» is formulated. The author regards the term as a strategic direction ensuring the implementation of criminal policy by the introduction in practice the most effective, accessible and economical forensic tools and methods to solve and investigate crimes. It is emphasized that at the present stage of development of society, in the conditions of globalization of the economy, challenges in the field of information technologies, environmental problems, interstate relations, the tasks of protecting fundamentally new relations and interests are being actualized. Legislators formulate new elements of crimes against property, in the field of economics, violations of tax legislation, protection of the financial and banking system, information technologies, as well as crimes related to systemic corruption. In this regard, criminology faces the task of timeliness and adequacy of scientific developments of the crime mode, qualitative changes in legislation and forecasting the needs of practice in combating crime. The digitalization of the preliminary investigation should become the most important direction of the implementation of the forensic policy. The author raises the question of the development of a forensic strategy and the formulation of a forensic policy. It is proposed to develop a strategy (concept, program) for the development of criminalistics as an applied science for 5-10 years with the participation of the leading criminalistics departments of the universities of the country. This document will be discussed and adopted at the All-Russian Congress of Criminologists.

Analisis Forensik Konten dan Timestamp pada Aplikasi Tiktok

<p><em>The Tiktok application is one of the social media platform applications that often finds many loopholes to get the identity of the application's users. TikTok has experienced tremendous growth by reaching 1.5 billion users in 2019. This research uses </em><em>an</em><em> Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) method as a standard in the research phase to reveal the timestamps obtained from the TikTok application. The method used in this research is the National Institute of Standard Technology (NIST). Th</em><em>e</em><em> research uses forensic tools, namely Browser History Capture/Viewer, Video Cache Viewer, Unfurl and Urlebird. The result of this research show</em><em>s </em><em>a complete description of all digital artifacts and timestamps obtained from TikTok content. Furthermore, </em><em>by </em><em>using the results of the analysis in th</em><em>e research</em><em>, it is </em><em>expected</em><em> that </em><em>the research</em><em> can </em><em>help to </em><em>reconstruct the content and </em><em>to </em><em>search for keywords from the timestamp in th</em><em>e</em><em> TikTok application.</em></p>

Ear morphology and morphometry as potential forensic tools for identification of the Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba populations of Nigeria

Background The human external ear is unique in every individual in terms of shape, size and dimension making it suitable in forensic anthropology for sex estimation and personal identification purposes. The study aimed to evaluate sexual dimorphism and ethnic specificity of the external ear in major Nigerian ethnic populations. Results There was variation in the morphological features of the external ear of the sampled subjects. The external ear features vary in the right and left ears in both sexes of the ethnic groups. All variables were statistically significant (p < 0.05) except ear width. Univariate discriminant function gave sex prediction accuracies between 56.4 and 57.3% for left and right ears, respectively. Population-specific sex prediction accuracy using stepwise discriminant analysis of left ear variables ranged 58–69.7% and 57.5–74.2% for right ear. Conclusion The ear parameters showed potential for sex estimation, but cannot be solely relied upon for personal identification.

Perbandingan Tool Forensik pada Mozilla Firefox Private Mode Menggunakan Metode NIST

Penggunaan System Operasi Linux yang didistribusikan secara open source menjadikannya operating system yang dapat didistribusikan secara masif oleh banyak perusahaan. PC/Notebook maupun perangkat pintar yang berbasiskan Linux semakin diminati oleh user karena dalam proses distribusinya tidak dipungut biaya apapun. Memberikan layanan browsing internet kepada para user secara privat dan tidak meninggalkan jejak digital merupakan salah satu upaya yang dilakukan oleh web browser sebagai upaya invovasi web browser mendapatkan pengguna layanan sebanyak-banyaknya. Metode investigasi forensic web browser private mode menjadi hal yang perlu guna menjadi acuan dalam melakukan forensic terhadap kasus/kejadian kejahatan yang melibatkan layanan browsing secara privat. Ada banyak tools yang dapat dimanfaatkan untuk melakukan live forensics dan analisis data. Penelitian ini berhasil mengungkap bahwa layanan browsing secara privat yang disediakan oleh Mozilla Firefox nyata-nyata tidak privat secara menyeluruh. Artefak digital masih dapat ditemukan dalam RAM dan dianalisa dengan menggunakan berbagai macam tools untuk forensic, tools Autopsy berhasil mendapatkan data log browser sebesar 83%. Hasil artefak investigasi tersebut dapat menjadi acuan permulaan para investigator dalam penegakan hukum untuk mencari tersangka lain dan mendalami sebuah kasus yang melibatkan banyak pihak.

Criminalization of Care: Drug Testing Pregnant Patients

This article reveals how law and legal interests transform medicine. Drawing on qualitative interviews with medical professionals, this study shows how providers mobilize law and engage in investigatory work as they deliver care. Using the case of drug testing pregnant patients, I examine three mechanisms by which medico-legal hybridity occurs in clinical settings. The first mechanism, clinicalization, describes how forensic tools and methods are cast in clinical terminology, effectively cloaking their forensic intent. In the second, medical professionals informally rank the riskiness of illicit substances using both medical and criminal-legal assessments. The third mechanism describes how gender, race, and class inform forensic decision-making and criminal suspicion in maternal health. The findings show that by straddling both medical and legal domains, medicine conforms to the standards and norms of neither institution while also suspending meaningful rights for patients seeking care.

Performance of Cryptographic Hash function used in Digital Forensic tools

Cryptographic hash functions are which transform any long message to fixed-length data. It seeks to ensure the confidentiality of the data through the cryptographic hash. The digital forensic tool is a method for extracting information from various storage devices, such as hard drives, memory. SHA-1 and SHA-2 methods are both widely used in forensic image archives. The hash method is usually used during evidence processing, the checking of forensic images (duplicate evidence), then at the completion of the analysis again to ensure data integrity and forensic evaluation of evidence. There was a vulnerability called a collision in the hashing algorithm in which two independent messages had the same hash values. While SHA-3 is secure than its former counterparts, the processors for general purposes are being slow and are not yet so popular. This task proposes a basic yet successful framework to meet the needs of cyber forensics, combining hash functions with other cryptographic concepts, for instance, SALT, such as modified secured hash algorithm (MSHA). A salt applies to the hashing mechanism to make it exclusive, expand its complexity and reduce user attacks like hash tables without increasing user requirements.