This paper proposes to study the impact of image selective encryption on both forensics and privacy preserving mechanisms. The proposed selective encryption scheme works independently on each bitplane by encrypting the s most significant bits of each pixel. We show that this mechanism can be used to increase privacy by mitigating image recognition tasks. In order to guarantee a trade-off between forensics analysis and privacy, the signal of interest used for forensics purposes is extracted from the 8--s least significant bits of the protected image. We show on the CASIA2 database that good tampering detection capabilities can be achieved for s $\in$ {3,. .. , 5} with an accuracy above 80% using SRMQ1 features, while preventing class recognition tasks using CNN with an accuracy smaller than 50%.
Digital forensic science is very much still in its infancy, but is becoming increasingly invaluable to investigators. A popular area for research is seeking a standard methodology to make the digital forensic process accurate, robust, and efficient. The first digital forensic process model proposed contains four steps: Acquisition, Identification, Evaluation and Admission. Since then, numerous process models have been proposed to explain the steps of identifying, acquiring, analysing, storage, and reporting on the evidence obtained from various digital devices. In recent years, an increasing n…
The number of cyber attacks has increased tremendously in the last few years. This resulted into both human and financial losses at the individual and organization levels. Recently, cyber-criminals are leveraging new skills and capabilities by employing anti-forensics activities, techniques and tools to cover their tracks and evade any possible detection. Consequently, cyber-attacks are becoming more efficient and more sophisticated. Therefore, traditional cryptographic and non-cryptographic solutions and access control systems are no longer enough to prevent such cyber attacks, especially in …
Due to its critical role in cybersecurity, digital forensics has received significant attention from researchers and practitioners alike. The ever increasing sophistication of modern cyberattacks is directly related to the complexity of evidence acquisition, which often requires the use of several technologies. To date, researchers have presented many surveys and reviews on the field. However, such articles focused on the advances of each particular domain of digital forensics individually. Therefore, while each of these surveys facilitates researchers and practitioners to keep up with the lat…
Due to the increasing connectivity of modern vehicles, collected data is no longer only stored in the vehicle itself but also transmitted to car manufacturers and vehicle assistant apps. This development opens up new possibilities for digital forensics in criminal investigations involving modern vehicles. This paper deals with the digital forensic analysis of vehicle assistant apps of eight car manufacturers. We reconstruct the driver's activities based on the data stored on the smartphones and in the manufacturer's backend. For this purpose, data of the Android and iOS apps of the car manufac…
The increasing adoption of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices present new challenges to digital forensic investigators and law enforcement agencies when investigation into cybercrime on these new platforms are required. However, there has been no formal study to document actual challenges faced by investigators and whether existing tools help them in their work. Prior issues such as the correlation and consistency problem in digital forensic evidence have also become a pressing concern in light of numerous evidence sources from IoT devices. Motivated by these observations, we conduct a user stud…
Owing to a number of reasons, the deployment of encryption solutions are beginning to be ubiquitous at both organizational and individual levels. The most emphasized reason is the necessity to ensure confidentiality of privileged information. Unfortunately, it is also popular as cyber-criminals' escape route from the grasp of digital forensic investigations. The direct encryption of data or indirect encryption of storage devices, more often than not, prevents access to such information contained therein. This consequently leaves the forensics investigation team, and subsequently the prosecutio…
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 (among others). Much of digital forensic practice assumes careful control and management of IT assets…
The increasing prevalence of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has made it inevitable that their pertinence to digital forensic investigations will increase into the foreseeable future. These devices produced by various vendors often posses limited standard interfaces for communication, such as USB ports or WiFi/Bluetooth wireless interfaces. Meanwhile, with an increasing mainstream focus on the security and privacy of user data, built-in encryption is becoming commonplace in consumer-level computing devices, and IoT devices are no exception. Under these circumstances, a significant challenge i…
University College Dublin（都柏林大学学院）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Waterford Institute of Technology（沃特福德理工学院）
Multi-year digital forensic backlogs have become commonplace in law enforcement agencies throughout the globe. Digital forensic investigators are overloaded with the volume of cases requiring their expertise compounded by the volume of data to be processed. Artificial intelligence is often seen as the solution to many big data problems. This paper summarises existing artificial intelligence based tools and approaches in digital forensics. Automated evidence processing leveraging artificial intelligence based techniques shows great promise in expediting the digital forensic analysis process whi…
Security issues, threats, and attacks in relation with the IoT have been identified as promising and challenging area of research. Eventually, the need for a forensics methodology for investigating IoT-related crime is therefore essential. However, the IoT poses many challenges for forensics investigators. These include the wide range and variety of information, the unclear lines of differentiation between networks, for example private networks increasingly fading into public networks. Further, integration of a large number of objects in IoT forensic interest, along with the relevance of ident…
Given the ever-increasing prevalence of technology in modern life, there is a corresponding increase in the likelihood of digital devices being pertinent to a criminal investigation or civil litigation. As a direct consequence, the number of investigations requiring digital forensic expertise is resulting in huge digital evidence backlogs being encountered by law enforcement agencies throughout the world. It can be anticipated that the number of cases requiring digital forensic analysis will greatly increase in the future. It is also likely that each case will require the analysis of an increa…
With the advance of technology, Criminal Justice agencies are being confronted with an increased need to investigate crimes perpetuated partially or entirely over the Internet. These types of crime are known as cybercrimes. In order to conceal illegal online activity, criminals often use private browsing features or browsers designed to provide total browsing privacy. The use of private browsing is a common challenge faced in for example child exploitation investigations, which usually originate on the Internet. Although private browsing features are not designed specifically for criminal acti…
The demand for cloud computing is increasing because of the popularity of digital devices and the wide use of the Internet. Among cloud computing services, most consumers use cloud storage services that provide mass storage. This is because these services give them various additional functions as well as storage. It is easy to access cloud storage services using smartphones. With increasing utilization, it is possible for malicious users to abuse cloud storage services. Therefore, a study on digital forensic investigation of cloud storage services is necessary. This paper proposes new procedur…
Today, the volume of evidence collected per case is growing exponentially, to address this problem forensics investigators are looking for investigation process with tools built on new technologies like big data, cloud services, and Deep Learning (DL) techniques. Consequently, the accuracy of artifacts found also relies on the performance of techniques used, especially DL models. Recently, \textbf{D}eep \textbf{N}eural \textbf{N}ets (\textbf{DNN}) have achieved state of the art performance in the tasks of classification and recognition. In the context of digital forensics, DNN has been applied…
Internet of Things devices such as the Amazon Echo are undoubtedly great sources of potential digital evidence due to their ubiquitous use and their always on mode of operation, constituting a human life black box. The Amazon Echo in particular plays a centric role for the cloud based intelligent virtual assistant Alexa developed by Amazon Lab126. The Alexa enabled wireless smart speaker is the gateway for all voice commands submitted to Alexa. Moreover, the IVA interacts with a plethora of compatible IoT devices and third party applications that leverage cloud resources. Understanding the com…
Providing the ability to any law enforcement officer to remotely transfer an image from any suspect computer directly to a forensic laboratory for analysis, can only help to greatly reduce the time wasted by forensic investigators in conducting on-site collection of computer equipment. RAFT (Remote Acquisition Forensic Tool) is a system designed to facilitate forensic investigators by remotely gathering digital evidence. This is achieved through the implementation of a secure, verifiable client/server imaging architecture. The RAFT system is designed to be relatively easy to use, requiring min…
Organised crime, as well as individual criminals, is benefiting from the protection of private browsers provide to those who would carry out illegal activity, such as money laundering, drug trafficking, the online exchange of child-abuse material, etc. The protection afforded to users of the Epic Privacy Browser illustrates these benefits. This browser is currently in use in approximately 180 countries worldwide. This paper outlines the location and type of evidence available through live and post-mortem state analyses of the Epic Privacy Browser. This study identifies the manner in which the …
Digital forensic analysts depend on the ability to understand the social networks of the individuals they investigate. We develop a novel method for automatically constructing these networks from collected hard drives. We accomplish this by scanning the raw storage media for email addresses, constructing co-reference networks based on the proximity of email addresses to each other, then selecting connected components that correspond to real communication networks. We validate our analysis against a tagged data-set of networks for which we determined ground truth through interviews with the dri…
As the digitization of information-intensive processes gains momentum in nowadays, the concern is growing about how to deal with the ever-growing problem of cybercrime. To this end, law enforcement officials and security firms use sophisticated digital forensics techniques for analyzing and investigating cybercrimes. However, multi-jurisdictional mandates, interoperability issues, the massive amount of evidence gathered (multimedia, text etc.) and multiple stakeholders involved (law enforcement agencies, security firms etc.) are just a few among the various challenges that hinder the adoption …
Due to budgetary constraints and the high level of training required, digital forensic analysts are in short supply in police forces the world over. This inevitably leads to a prolonged time taken between an investigator sending the digital evidence for analysis and receiving the analytical report back. In an attempt to expedite this procedure, various process models have been created to place the forensic analyst in the field conducting a triage of the digital evidence. By conducting triage in the field, an investigator is able to act upon pertinent information quicker, while waiting on the f…
Exploring the Potential of Large Language Models for Improving Digital Forensic Investigation Efficiency
Security Research Group, School of Computer Science , addressline= University College Dublin , city= Belfield , state= Dublin 4 , country= Ireland；organization= School of Criminal Justice , addressline= University of Lausanne , state= Lausanne , country= Switzerland；organization= Present affiliation: Institute of Computer Science , addressline= University of Augsburg , state= Augsburg , country= Germany
One of the main issues in digital forensics is the management of evidences. From the time of evidence collection until the time of their exploitation in a legal court, evidences may be accessed by multiple parties involved in the investigation that take temporary their ownership. This process, called Chain of Custody (CoC), must ensure that evidences are not altered during the investigation, despite multiple entities owned them, in order to be admissible in a legal court. Currently digital evidences CoC is managed entirely manually with entities involved in the chain required to fill in docume…
Digital forensic investigation is used in various areas related to digital devices including the cyber crime. This is an investigative process using many techniques, which have implemented as tools. The types of files covered by the digital forensic investigation are wide and varied, however, there is no way to express the results into a standardized format. The standardization are different by types of device, file system, or application. Different outputs make it time-consuming and difficult to share information and to implement integration. In addition, it could weaken cyber security. Thus,…
Metamodeling is used as a general technique for integrating and defining models from different domains. This technique can be used in diverse application domains, especially for purposes of standardization. Also, this process mainly has a focus on the identification of general concepts that exist in various problem domain and their relations and to solve complexity, interoperability, and heterogeneity aspects of different domains. Several diverse metamodeling development approaches have been proposed in the literature to develop metamodels. Each metamodeling development process has some advant…
With the passage of time and as new types of storage devices are introduced into the marketplace, contemporary devices will slowly lose their compatibility with current operating systems and PC hardware. As a result, such legacy devices will pose an analytical challenge to the field of digital forensics. Dated technology, while still fully functional, is becoming increasingly incompatible with most contemporary computing hardware and software and thus cannot be properly examined in present-day digital forensic environments. This fact will not be lost on those who utilize legacy hardware to com…
The introduction of Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems into personal homes and businesses prompts the idea that such ecosystems contain residual data, which can be used as digital evidence in court proceedings. However, the forensic examination of IoT ecosystems introduces a number of investigative problems for the digital forensics community. One of these problems is the limited availability of practical processes and techniques to guide the preservation and analysis of residual data from these ecosystems. Focusing on a detailed case study of the iHealth Smart Scale ecosystem, we present an …
In everyday life. Technological advancement can be found in many facets of life, including personal computers, mobile devices, wearables, cloud services, video gaming, web-powered messaging, social media, Internet-connected devices, etc. This technological influence has resulted in these technologies being employed by criminals to conduct a range of crimes -- both online and offline. Both the number of cases requiring digital forensic analysis and the sheer volume of information to be processed in each case has increased rapidly in recent years. As a result, the requirement for digital forensi…
In the last decade, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices are proliferated in many domains including critical infrastructures such as energy, transportation and manufacturing. Consequently, most of the daily operations now rely on the data coming from wireless sensors or IoT devices and their actions. In addition, personal IoT devices are heavily used for social media applications, which connect people as well as all critical infrastructures to each other under the cyber domain. However, this connectedness also comes with the risk of increasing number of cyber at…
The growth of digital storage capacities and diversity devices has had a significant time impact on digital forensic laboratories in law enforcement. Backlogs have become commonplace and increasingly more time is spent in the acquisition and preparation steps of an investigation as opposed to detailed evidence analysis and reporting. There is generally little room for increasing digital investigation capacity in law enforcement digital forensic units and the allocated budgets for these units are often decreasing. In the context of developing an efficient investigation process, one of the key c…
IoT devices and sensors have been utilized in a cooperative manner to enable the concept of a smart environment. In these smart settings, abundant data is generated as a result of the interactions between devices and users' day-to-day activities. Such data contain valuable forensic information about events and actions occurring inside the smart environment and, if analyzed, may help hold those violating security policies accountable. In this paper, we introduce IoTDots, a novel digital forensic framework for a smart environment such as smart homes and smart offices. IoTDots has two main compon…
This paper presents DIALOG (Digital Investigation Ontology); a framework for the management, reuse, and analysis of Digital Investigation knowledge. DIALOG provides a general, application independent vocabulary that can be used to describe an investigation at different levels of detail. DIALOG is defined to encapsulate all concepts of the digital forensics field and the relationships between them. In particular, we concentrate on the Windows Registry, where registry keys are modeled in terms of both their structure and function. Registry analysis software tools are modeled in a similar manner …
