In the course of the last years, there has been an established forensic process in place known by every investigator and researcher. This traditional process is regarded to produce valid evidence when it comes to court trials and, more importantly, it specifies on a very precise level how to acquire a suspects machine and handle the data within. However, when …

In recent times, the Internet of Things (IoT) has rapidly emerged as one of the most influential information and communication technologies (ICT). The various constituents of the IoT together offer novel technological opportunities by facilitating the so-called “hyper-connected world.” The fundamental tasks that need to be performed to provide such a function involve the transceiving, storing, and analyzing of digital …

Mobile phones have been playing a very significant role in our daily activities for the last decade. With the increase need for these devices, people are now more reliant on their smartphone applications for their daily tasks and many prefer to save their mobile data on a cloud platform to access them anywhere on any device. Cloud technology is the …

The goal of cyber attack investigation is to fully reconstruct the details of an attack, so we can trace back to its origin, and recover the system from the damage caused by the attack. However, it is often difficult and requires tremendous manual efforts because attack events occurred days or even weeks before the investigation and detailed information we need …

File systems have always played a vital role in digital forensics and during the past 30-40 years many of these have been developed to suit different needs. Some file systems are more tightly connected to a specific Operating System (OS). For instance HFS and HFS+ have been the file systems of choice in Apple devices for over 30 years. Much …

Carrier’s book File System Forensic Analysis is one of the most comprehensive sources when it comes to the forensic analysis of file systems. Published in 2005, it provides details about the most commonly used file systems of that time as well as a process model to analyze file systems in general. The Sleuth Kit is the implementation of Carrier’s model …

IoT device forensics is a difficult problem given that manufactured IoT devices are not standardized, many store little to no historical data, and are always connected; making them extremely volatile. The goal of this paper was to address these challenges by presenting a primary account for a general framework and practical approach we term Forensic State Acquisition from Internet of …

Redundant capacity in filesystem timestamps is recently proposed in the literature as an effective means for information hiding and data leakage. Here, the authors evaluate the steganographic capabilities of such channels and propose techniques to aid digital forensics investigation towards identifying and detecting manipulated filesystem timestamps. Their findings indicate that different storage media and interfaces exhibit different timestamp creation patterns. …

This work explores the development of MemTri. A memory forensics triage tool that can assess the likelihood of criminal activity in a memory image, based on evidence data artefacts generated by several applications. Fictitious illegal suspect activity scenarios were performed on virtual machines to generate 60 test memory images for input into MemTri. Four categories of applications (i.e. Internet Browsers, …

Digital forensics is an evolving discipline that looks for evidence in electronic devices. It is being utilised in investigating attacks and accusing cyber criminals. As in physical crimes, a cyber criminal might try every possible technique to hide responsibility about a crime. This can be done by manipulating all kinds of traces that could lead investigators to resolve cases. For …