Calm before the storm: the challenges of cloud computing in digital forensics

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 (particularly data storage) during the conduct of an investigation. This paper summarises the key aspects of cloud computing and analyses how established digital forensic procedures will be invalidated in this new environment. Several new research challenges addressing this changing context are also identified and discussed

iPhone forensics methodology and tools

iPhone mobile devices are rapidly overtaking the new generation of mobile phones market, especially among the young generation. It is also gaining a lot of popularity among security specialists and fancy gadgets for collectors. The device is considered as a “special” mobile phone due to its ability to perform multi-operations if not multitasking. It can therefore be used as a entertainment media device, a camera, a GPS, Internet surfing via Wi-Fi technology, Internet Mobile Edge Services, personal organizer, and finally performing as a cell phone with all the usual services including sms, and so forth. However, the difference between the iPhone and the other conventional phones vendors is its ability to store and process huge volume of data which is supported by decent computing capabilities of the iPhone processor. As part of every technology, such a device can be used for legal and illegal activities. Therefore the potential risks from such “special” technology are not limited to the possibility of containing illegal materials, such as audios and visuals, including explicit materials, images, documents and the possibility of propagating malicious activities rapidly. Such modification can breach or tamper with the telecommunications network authorities and regulations. The goal of this paper is to focus on both the logical and the physical extraction of the iPhone generation one through the extraction of the iPhone flash drive NAND memory chip and also the logical extraction of data onto the second generation of iPhone using various techniques and methods at our disposal

EviPlant: An efficient digital forensic challenge creation, manipulation and distribution solution

Education and training in digital forensics requires a variety of suitable challenge corpora containing realistic features including regular wear-and-tear, background noise, and the actual digital traces to be discovered during investigation. Typically, the creation of these challenges requires overly arduous effort on the part of the educator to ensure their viability. Once created, the challenge image needs to be stored and distributed to a class for practical training. This storage and distribution step requires significant time and resources and may not even be possible in an online/distance learning scenario due to the data sizes involved. As part of this paper, we introduce a more capable methodology and system as an alternative to current approaches. EviPlant is a system designed for the efficient creation, manipulation, storage and distribution of challenges for digital forensics education and training. The system relies on the initial distribution of base disk images, i.e., images containing solely base operating systems. In order to create challenges for students, educators can boot the base system, emulate the desired activity and perform a "diffing" of resultant image and the base image. This diffing process extracts the modified artefacts and associated metadata and stores them in an "evidence package". Evidence packages can be created for different personae, different wear-and-tear, different emulated crimes, etc., and multiple evidence packages can be distributed to students and integrated into the base images. A number of additional applications in digital forensic challenge creation for tool testing and validation, proficiency testing, and malware analysis are also discussed as a result of using EviPlant.Comment: Digital Forensic Research Workshop Europe 201

Privacy Preserving Internet Browsers: Forensic Analysis of Browzar

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 activity, they have become a valuable tool for criminals looking to conceal their online activity. As such, Technological Crime units often focus their forensic analysis on thoroughly examining the web history on a computer. Private browsing features and browsers often require a more in-depth, post mortem analysis. This often requires the use of multiple tools, as well as different forensic approaches to uncover incriminating evidence. This evidence may be required in a court of law, where analysts are often challenged both on their findings and on the tools and approaches used to recover evidence. However, there are very few research on evaluating of private browsing in terms of privacy preserving as well as forensic acquisition and analysis of privacy preserving internet browsers. Therefore in this chapter, we firstly review the private mode of popular internet browsers. Next, we describe the forensic acquisition and analysis of Browzar, a privacy preserving internet browser and compare it with other popular internet browser

PRECEPT:a framework for ethical digital forensics investigations

Purpose: Cyber-enabled crimes are on the increase, and law enforcement has had to expand many of their detecting activities into the digital domain. As such, the field of digital forensics has become far more sophisticated over the years and is now able to uncover even more evidence that can be used to support prosecution of cyber criminals in a court of law. Governments, too, have embraced the ability to track suspicious individuals in the online world. Forensics investigators are driven to gather data exhaustively, being under pressure to provide law enforcement with sufficient evidence to secure a conviction. Yet, there are concerns about the ethics and justice of untrammeled investigations on a number of levels. On an organizational level, unconstrained investigations could interfere with, and damage, the organization’s right to control the disclosure of their intellectual capital. On an individual level, those being investigated could easily have their legal privacy rights violated by forensics investigations. On a societal level, there might be a sense of injustice at the perceived inequality of current practice in this domain. This paper argues the need for a practical, ethically-grounded approach to digital forensic investigations, one that acknowledges and respects the privacy rights of individuals and the intellectual capital disclosure rights of organisations, as well as acknowledging the needs of law enforcement. We derive a set of ethical guidelines, then map these onto a forensics investigation framework. We subjected the framework to expert review in two stages, refining the framework after each stage. We conclude by proposing the refined ethically-grounded digital forensics investigation framework. Our treatise is primarily UK based, but the concepts presented here have international relevance and applicability.Design methodology: In this paper, the lens of justice theory is used to explore the tension that exists between the needs of digital forensic investigations into cybercrimes on the one hand, and, on the other, individuals’ rights to privacy and organizations’ rights to control intellectual capital disclosure.Findings: The investigation revealed a potential inequality between the practices of digital forensics investigators and the rights of other stakeholders. That being so, the need for a more ethically-informed approach to digital forensics investigations, as a remedy, is highlighted, and a framework proposed to provide this.Practical Implications: Our proposed ethically-informed framework for guiding digital forensics investigations suggest a way of re-establishing the equality of the stakeholders in this arena, and ensuring that the potential for a sense of injustice is reduced.Originality/value: Justice theory is used to highlight the difficulties in squaring the circle between the rights and expectations of all stakeholders in the digital forensics arena. The outcome is the forensics investigation guideline, PRECEpt: Privacy-Respecting EthiCal framEwork, which provides the basis for a re-aligning of the balance between the requirements and expectations of digital forensic investigators on the one hand, and individual and organizational expectations and rights, on the other