Digital Forensics as a Big Data Challenge

Digital Forensics, as a science and part of the forensic sciences, is facing new challenges that may well render established models and practices obsolete. The dimensions of potential digital evidence supports has grown exponentially, be it hard disks in desktop and laptops or solid state memories in mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, even while latency times lag behind. Cloud services are now sources of potential evidence in a vast range of investigations and network traffic also follows a growing trend and in cyber security the necessity of sifting through vast amount of data quickly is now paramount. On a higher level investigations - and intelligence analysis - can profit from sophisticated analysis of such datasets as social network structures, corpora of text to be analysed for authorship and attribution. All of the above highlights the convergence between so-called data science and digital forensics, to tack the fundamental challenge of analyse vast amount of data ("big data") in actionable time while at the same time preserving forensic principles in order for the results to be presented in a court of law. The paper, after introducing digital forensics and data science, explores the challenges above and proceed to propose how techniques and algorithms used in big data analysis can be adapted to the unique context of digital forensics, ranging from the managing of evidence via Map-Reduce to machine learning techniques for triage and analysis of big forensic disk images and network traffic dumps. In the conclusion the paper proposes a model to integrate this new paradigm into established forensic standards and best practices and tries to foresee future trends.