In-the-wild residual data research and privacy

As the world becomes increasingly dependent on technology, researchers endeavor to understand how technology is used, the impact it has on everyday life and the life-cycle and span of digital information. In doing so, researchers are increasingly gathering `real-world' or `in the wild' residual data, obtained from a variety of sources without the explicit consent of the original owners. This data gathering raises significant concerns regarding privacy, ethics and legislation, as well as practical considerations concerning investigator training, data storage, overall security and disposal. This paper surveys recent studies of residual data gathered in the wild and analyses the challenges that were faced. Taking these insights, the paper presents a compendium of practices for addressing the issues that arise in in the wild residual data research. The practices presented in this paper can be used to critique current projects and assess the feasibility of proposed future research

The Potential for cross-drive analysis using automated digital forensic timelines

Cross-Drive Analysis (CDA) is a technique designed to allow an investigator to “simultaneously consider information from across a corpus of many data sources”. Existing approaches include multi-drive correlation using text searching, e.g. email addresses, message IDs, credit card numbers or social security numbers. Such techniques have the potential to identify drives of interest from a large set, provide additional information about events that occurred on a single disk, and potentially determine social network membership. Another analysis technique that has significantly advanced in recent years is the use of timelines. Tools currently exist that can extract dates and times from the file system metadata (i.e. MACE times) and also examine the content of certain file types and extract metadata from within. This approach provides a great deal of data that can assist with an investigation, but also compounds the problem of having too much data to examine. A recent paper adds an additional timeline analysis capability, by automatically producing a high-level summary of the activity on a computer system, by combining sets of low-level events into high-level events, for example reducing a setupapi event and several events from the Windows Registry to a single event of ‘a USB stick was connected’. This paper provides an investigation into the extent to which events in such a high-level timeline have the properties suitable to assist with Cross-Drive Analysis. The paper provides several examples that use timelines generated from multiple disk images, including USB stick connections, Skype calls, and access to files on a memory card

Micro-CernVM: Slashing the Cost of Building and Deploying Virtual Machines

The traditional virtual machine building and and deployment process is centered around the virtual machine hard disk image. The packages comprising the VM operating system are carefully selected, hard disk images are built for a variety of different hypervisors, and images have to be distributed and decompressed in order to instantiate a virtual machine. Within the HEP community, the CernVM File System has been established in order to decouple the distribution from the experiment software from the building and distribution of the VM hard disk images. We show how to get rid of such pre-built hard disk images altogether. Due to the high requirements on POSIX compliance imposed by HEP application software, CernVM-FS can also be used to host and boot a Linux operating system. This allows the use of a tiny bootable CD image that comprises only a Linux kernel while the rest of the operating system is provided on demand by CernVM-FS. This approach speeds up the initial instantiation time and reduces virtual machine image sizes by an order of magnitude. Furthermore, security updates can be distributed instantaneously through CernVM-FS. By leveraging the fact that CernVM-FS is a versioning file system, a historic analysis environment can be easily re-spawned by selecting the corresponding CernVM-FS file system snapshot.Comment: Conference paper at the 2013 Computing in High Energy Physics (CHEP) Conference, Amsterda