The Impact of Culture and Religion on Digital Forensics: The Study of the Role of Digital Evidence in the Legal Process in Saudi Arabia

This work contributes to the multi-disciplinary community of researchers in computer science, information technology and computer forensics working together with legal enforcement professionals involved in digital forensic investigations. It is focused on the relationship between scientific approaches underpinning digital forensics and the Islamic law underpinning legal enforcement. Saudi Arabia (KSA) is studied as an example of an Islamic country that has adopted international guidelines, such as ACPO, in its legal enforcement procedures. The relationship between Islamic law and scientific ACPO guidelines is examined in detail through the practices of digital forensic practitioners in the process of discovery, preparation and presentation of digital evidence for use in Islamic courts in KSA. In this context, the influence of religion and culture on the role and status of digital evidence throughout the entire legal process has been the main focus of this research. Similar studies in the literature confirm that culture and religion are significant factors in the relationship between law, legal enforcement procedure and digital evidence. Islamic societies, however, have not been extensively studied from this perspective, and this study aims to address issues that arise at both professional and personal levels. Therefore the research questions that this study aims to answer are: in what way and to what extent Islamic religion and Saudi culture affect the status of digital evidence in the KSA legal process and what principles the practitioners have to observe in the way they treat digital evidence in judicial proceedings. The methodology is based on a mixed-method approach where the pilot questionnaire identified legal professionals who come into contact with digital evidence, their educational and professional profiles. Qualitative methods included case studies, interviews and documentary evidence to discover how their beliefs and attitudes influence their trust in digital evidence. The findings show that a KSA judge would trust witnesses more than digital evidence, due to the influence of tradition, which regards justice and law to arise from the relationship between Man and God. Digital evidence, as it arises from the scientific method, is acceptable, but there is underlying lack of trust in its authenticity, reliability and credibility. In the eyes of the legal enforcement professionals working in all areas of the KSA legal process, acceptance of digital evidence in the KSA judicial system can best be improved if knowledge, education and skills of digital forensics specialists is improved also, so that they can be trusted as expert witnesses. This further shows the significance of KSA laws, regulations and education of digital forensic experts as the primary means for establishing trust in digital evidence. Further research following from this study will be focused on comparative studies of other Islamic non-Islamic legal systems as they adopt and adapt western guidelines such as ACPO to their religion, culture and legal systemsSaudi Cultural Bureau,London, U

Literature based Cyber Security Topics: Handbook

Cyber security is the practice of protecting systems, networks, and programs from digital attacks. These cyber attacks are usually aimed at accessing, changing, or destroying sensitive information; extorting money from users; or interrupting normal business processes. Cloud computing has emerged from the legacy data centres. Consequently, threats applicable in legacy system are equally applicable to cloud computing along with emerging new threats that plague only the cloud systems. Traditionally the data centres were hosted on-premises. Hence, control over the data was comparatively easier than handling a cloud system which is borderless and ubiquitous. Threats due to multi-tenancy, access from anywhere, control of cloud, etc. are some examples of why cloud security becomes important. Considering the significance of cloud security, this work is an attempt to understand the existing cloud service and deployment models, and the major threat factors to cloud security that may be critical in cloud environment. It also highlights various methods employed by the attackers to cause the damage. Cyber-attacks are highlighted as well. This work will be profoundly helpful to the industry and researchers in understanding the various cloud specific cyber-attack and enable them to evolve the strategy to counter them more effectively

Resource materials on technology-enabled crime

Designed to assist prosecutors and members of the judiciary faced with proceedings involving technology-enabled crime, the report will be a useful general guide to concepts and terms for other non-technical people

Knowledge Production from Social Networks Sites. Using Social Media Evidence in the Criminal Procedure

This thesis focuses on the interaction between social network sites (SNS) and the legal system, trying to answer a specific question, that is, through introducing social media evidence, whether there is a change of finding facts and identifying the truth in criminal proceedings. To achieve the research objectives, three sub-topics should be discussed in turn; first, how can we transform information on social network sites to valuable evidence in court? In this part, the research will explore the proceedings of extracting information on SNS, such as posts, photos, check-in on Facebook etc., in order to use as evidence in the courtroom from the perspectives of law and internet forensic. Second, considering characteristics of these social media evidence, e.g. easy to be copied, deleted, tampered and transmitted, is it necessary to separate from evidence obtained through other technology or forensic science? Should the legal system need a new set of regulation on social media evidence? Third, how can we conquer challenges to core values in legal system, such as the privilege against self-incrimination or expectation of innocent in this digital era? As the positive contribution, this research tries to answer whether social network sites are a convenient tool for criminal prosecution, and whether internet forensics is useful to assist the investigational authority accusing the crime and finding the truth more accurately, to achieve the ultimate goal of the criminal procedure

The architecture of a digital forensic readiness management system

A coordinated approach to digital forensic readiness (DFR) in a large organisation requires the management and monitoring of a wide variety of resources, both human and technical. The resources involved in DFR in large organisations typically include staff from multiple departments and business units, as well as network infrastructure and computing platforms. The state of DFR within large organisations may therefore be adversely affected if the myriad human and technical resources involved are not managed in an optimal manner. This paper contributes to DFR by proposing the novel concept of a digital forensic readiness management system (DFRMS). The purpose of a DFRMS is to assist large organisations in achieving an optimal level of management for DFR. In addition to this, we offer an architecture for a DFRMS. This architecture is based on requirements for DFR that we ascertained from an exhaustive review of the DFR literature. We describe the architecture in detail and show that it meets the requirements set out in the DFR literature. The merits and disadvantages of the architecture are also discussed. Finally, we describe and explain an early prototype of a DFRMS.http://www.elsevier.com/locate/cosehb201

A Survey on Wireless Security: Technical Challenges, Recent Advances and Future Trends

This paper examines the security vulnerabilities and threats imposed by the inherent open nature of wireless communications and to devise efficient defense mechanisms for improving the wireless network security. We first summarize the security requirements of wireless networks, including their authenticity, confidentiality, integrity and availability issues. Next, a comprehensive overview of security attacks encountered in wireless networks is presented in view of the network protocol architecture, where the potential security threats are discussed at each protocol layer. We also provide a survey of the existing security protocols and algorithms that are adopted in the existing wireless network standards, such as the Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, and the long-term evolution (LTE) systems. Then, we discuss the state-of-the-art in physical-layer security, which is an emerging technique of securing the open communications environment against eavesdropping attacks at the physical layer. We also introduce the family of various jamming attacks and their counter-measures, including the constant jammer, intermittent jammer, reactive jammer, adaptive jammer and intelligent jammer. Additionally, we discuss the integration of physical-layer security into existing authentication and cryptography mechanisms for further securing wireless networks. Finally, some technical challenges which remain unresolved at the time of writing are summarized and the future trends in wireless security are discussed.Comment: 36 pages. Accepted to Appear in Proceedings of the IEEE, 201

Introductory Computer Forensics

INTERPOL (International Police) built cybercrime programs to keep up with emerging cyber threats, and aims to coordinate and assist international operations for ?ghting crimes involving computers. Although signi?cant international efforts are being made in dealing with cybercrime and cyber-terrorism, ?nding effective, cooperative, and collaborative ways to deal with complicated cases that span multiple jurisdictions has proven dif?cult in practic

Mobile web resource tracking during a disaster or crisis situation

This paper proposes a prototype solution for a mobile web resource tracking system using mobile devices during an emergency situation. The system provides real time data to a decision maker so that he/she can effectively and efficiently monitor resources and assess the situation accordingly. Mobile devices (i.e., smart phones) support the ease of use for any location and at anytime. The Internet technology is selected to enable multiple or cross platform technology solutions for different mobile devices. Resources in the scope of this project are human resources (e.g., a doctor, a police officer) and a chemical list in a room. With the use of a GPS-enabled device or a wireless-enabled device, the system is used to provide the current location of the human resources. Transferring data between system databases and mobile devices is one of the important areas to address in this project. Since location data of a user is sensitive data, data should be protected via an encrypted protected network. In addition, because of the urgency of any crisis situation, it is critical that data from the system be able to be retrieved in a reasonable time frame. The investigation includes the exploration of database and data transfer solutions to meet the data availability during emergency conditions on mobile devices. This document includes a description of the system design, a review of current technologies, proposed methodology, and the implementation. Review of the literature section provides background information on current available technologies that were studied (section 3). Four identified factors are suggested in the system design – usability, security, availability, and performance. The discussion of which technology is selected for each feature can be found in the implementation section 4. Proposed future research areas can be found in the conclusion section and recommendations for future work section