A Framework for Automated Digital Forensic Reporting
Abstract
Forensic analysis is the science of finding, examining and analyzing evidence in support of law enforcement, regulatory compliance or information gathering. Today, almost all digital forensic analysis is done by humans, requiring dedicated training and consuming man-hours at a considerable rate. As storage sizes increase and digital forensics gain importance in investigations, the backlog of media requiring human analysis has increased as well. This thesis tests today's top-of-the-line commercial and open source forensic tools with the analysis of a purpose-built Windows XP computer system containing two users that engaged in email, chat and web browsing. It presents the results of a pilot user study of the PyFlag forensic tool. Finally, it presents a technique to use software to do a preliminary analysis on media and provide a human readable report to the examiner. The goal of the technique is to perform rapid triaging of media and allow the human examiner to better prioritize man hours toward media with high return on investment.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Mar 01, 2009
- Accession Number
- ADA496800
Entities
People
- Paul F. Farrell Jr.
Organizations
- Naval Postgraduate School