A comparative study of teaching forensics at a university degree level

Computer forensics is a relatively young University discipline which has developed strongly in the United States and the United Kingdom but is still in its infancy in continental Europe. The national programmes and courses offered therefore differ in many ways. We report on two recently established degree programmes from two European countries: Great Britain and Germany. We present and compare the design of both programmes and conclude that they cover two complementary and orthogonal aspects of computer forensics education: (a) rigorous practical skills and (b) competence for fundamental research discoveries

Mitigating Circumstances in Cybercrime: a Position Paper

This paper argues the need for considering mitigating circumstances in cybercrime. Mitigating circumstances are conditions which moderate the culpability of an offender of a committed offence. Our argument is based on several observations. The cyberspace introduces a new family of communication and interaction styles and designs which could facilitate, make available, deceive, and in some cases persuade, a user to commit an offence. User’s lack of awareness could be a valid mitigation when using software features introduced without a proper management of change and enough precautionary mechanisms, e.g. warning messages. The cyber behaviour of users may not be necessarily a reflection of their real character and intention. Their irrational and unconscious actions may result from their immersed and prolonged presence in a particular cyber context. Hence, the consideration of the cyberspace design, the “cyber psychological” status of an offender and their inter-relation could form a new family of mitigating circumstances inherent and unique to cybercrime. This paper elaborates on this initial argument from different perspectives including software engineering, cyber psychology, digital forensics, social responsibility and law

A Research-led Practice-driven Digital Forensic Curriculum to Train Next Generation of Cyber Firefighters

Lack of skilled digital forensic professionals is seriously affecting the everyday life of everyone as businesses and law enforcement are struggling to fill the bare minimum number of digital investigator positions. This skills shortage can hinder incident response, with organizations failing to put effective measures in place following a cyberattack or to gather the digital evidence that could lead to the successful prosecution of malicious insiders and cybercriminals. It therefore makes the connected world less secure and digital economies less reliable, affecting everyone in their ecosystems. The commercial and public sectors are looking to higher education institutions to produce quality graduates equipped to enter the digital forensics profession. This paper presents our proposed research-led, practice-driven digital forensics curriculum. The curriculum is designed to respond to employers’ needs and is built on the experience of running a successful Cyber Security programme at Birmingham City University in the industrial heartland of the UK. All students will take a common set of modules in the first semester, but will be given the opportunity to specialise in digital forensics in the second semester and in their summer project, enabling them to graduate with the degree of MSc Digital Forensics

Language Independent Gender Identification Through Keystroke Analysis

Purpose – In this work we investigate the feasibility of iden tifying the gender of an author by measuring the keystroke duration when typing a message. Design/methodology/approach – Three classifiers were constructed and tested. We empirically evaluated the effectiveness of the classifiers by using empirical data. We used primary data as well as a publicly available dataset containing keystrokes from a diff erent language to validate the language independence assumption. Findings – The results of this work indicate that it is possible to identify the gender of an author by analyzing keystroke durations with a probability of success in the region of 70%. Research limitations/implications – The proposed approach was validated with a limited number of participants and languages, yet the statistical tests show the significance of the results. However, t his approach will be further tested with other languages. Practical implications – Having the ability to identify the gender of an aut hor of a certain piece of text has value in digital forensics, as the proposed method will be a source of circumstantial evidence for “putting fingers on keyboard” and for arbitrating cases where the true origin of a message needs to be identified. Social implications – If the proposed method is included as part of a text composing system (such as email, and instant messaging applications) it could increase trust toward the applications that use it and may also work as a deterrent for crimes involving forgery. Originality/value – The proposed approach combines and adapts techniques from the domains of biometric authentication and data classification