Elsevier

Digital Investigation

Volume 2, Issue 1, February 2005, Pages 31-35
Digital Investigation

The future of forensic computing

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.diin.2005.01.005Get rights and content

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A more focussed “expert”

As any analyst working in the “blood and guts”, or traditional world of forensics will attest, there exists a very diverse range of disciplines, each with their own ‘experts’. Such domain expertise is usually bourne out of research work in highly specific topics. For example, the use of fingerprints as an aid to identification was first postulated by Henry Faulds and William Herschel in an article published in the British science publication Nature in 1880. It was not until 1901, however, that

Diversity will drive changes in forensic investigation methods

In the 21 years between the postulation of the fingerprint theory by Faulds and Herschel in 1880 and the development of a classification system by Sir Francis Galton and Sir Edward Henry and its subsequent acceptance by Scotland Yard as a legitimate field of forensic science in 1901, the source data, the fingerprint, remained a static data source. Naturally, techniques for acquiring and examining fingerprint data have constantly improved but, while each fingerprint is different, the source of

The diversity–convergence paradox

Over the last few years we have seen a massive growth in the diversity of interfaces, disk formats and proprietary data structures. This alone is enough to keep the forensic analyst more than busy. Now add the tremendous growth in “converged” technologies such as the latest generation of PDA-phones and the problems facing forensic examiners increase. While such devices may have current industry standard storage devices which can be examined using existing techniques, what of their other

Is there an alternative future – in search of forensic nirvana

One of the key differentiators between the traditional and the digital forensics analyst is that the focus of the latter's analytical attention is not restricted to a single piece of evidence (such as blood or paper) but rather to a collection of evidential data such as the behaviour of the operating system and that of many different applications. Such analysis is made complex not just by the number of possible data formats, information structures, originating actions and data sources affecting

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