["Digital Forensic Tools Validation: The Software Engineering Principles Approach"]

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ABSTRACT

With its use highlighted in many high profile court cases around the world, Digital forensics over the last decade has become an integral part of the modern legal system and corporate investigations. As the discipline grows and it use becomes widely accepted, there is a need to align it with traditional forensic sciences and move towards strengthening an accreditation regime for the discipline. This paper examines the origins of science and scientific method to form the core premises for establishing criteria to assess digital forensics as a science and hence justifying the basis for standards and accreditation.

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

Introduction

Digital forensics is a branch of science that involves the application of scientific principles to the investigation of artifacts present in one or more digital devices in order to understand and reconstruct the sequence of events that must have transpired in generating the said artifacts. Digital forensics pertains to acquiring, examining, analyzing, and possibly documenting and presenting these artifacts and the reconstructed sequence of events as evidence in a court of law. Digital forensics developed as an independent field in the late 1990s and early 2000s when computer based crime started growing with the increasing usage of computers and more so, the Internet. In early days, it was called computer forensics since the evidence collected was restricted to computers. However, in recent years, with several technological advances, this restriction is no longer true.

Consequently, the process of conducting forensic investigations involving contemporary digital evidence has become more challenging. Computer forensics developed as an independent field in late 1990s and early 2000 when computer based crime started growing with the increasing popularity of computers and especially the Internet. Of the approximately half of respondents who experienced at least one security incident last year, fully 45.6 percent of them reported they'd been the subject of at least one targeted attack.

According to the 2010/11 CSI Computer Crime Survey, almost 46% of the respondents were affected by at least one form of computer crime. According to 2010 Gallup Computer Crime survey, 11% of American adults report that they were a victim of a computer or Internet crime on their home computer in the past year, up from the 6% to 8% levels found in the previous seven years.

The 2012 Indian Risk survey indicates that Computer and Internet crime remains the single largest source of national threat at 10.81% closely followed by terrorism at 10.43%. The 2006 Australian Computer Crime Survey has estimated computer facilitated financial fraud and proprietary information breaches at over A$ 2,000,000 in lost revenue. With the recent proliferation of newer digital devices in the markets and the increasing frequency of discovering such devices in investigations, a new term called digital forensics was coined. This new term now refers to investigating any type of media capable of storing digital information as part of a forensic investigation.

Research aim and objective

Following is the aim and objective of the study that will be analyzed throughout the research:

To ...