Title
Increasing digital investigator availability through efficient workflow management and automation
Abstract
The growth of digital storage capacities and diversity devices has had a significant time impact on digital forensic laboratories in law enforcement. Backlogs have become commonplace and increasingly more time is spent in the acquisition and preparation steps of an investigation as opposed to detailed evidence analysis and reporting. There is generally little room for increasing digital investigation capacity in law enforcement digital forensic units and the allocated budgets for these units are often decreasing. In the context of developing an efficient investigation process, one of the key challenges amounts to how to achieve more with less. This paper proposes a workflow management automation framework for handling common digital forensic tools. The objective is to streamline the digital investigation workflow - enabling more efficient use of limited hardware and software. The proposed automation framework reduces the time digital forensic experts waste conducting time-consuming, though necessary, tasks. The evidence processing time is decreased through server-side automation resulting in 24/7 evidence preparation. The proposed framework increases efficiency of use of forensic software and hardware, reduces the infrastructure costs and license fees, and simplifies the preparation steps for the digital investigator. The proposed approach is evaluated in a real-world scenario to evaluate its robustness and highlight its benefits.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1109/ISDFS.2016.7473520
2016 4th International Symposium on Digital Forensic and Security (ISDFS)
Keywords
Field
DocType
Workflow Management,Digital Forensics,Investigative Process,Workflow Automation
Workflow technology,Digital forensics,Software engineering,Computer security,Automation,Software,Engineering,Workflow engine,Workflow management system,Digital asset management,Workflow
Journal
Volume
Citations 
PageRank 
abs/1708.09053
0
0.34
References 
Authors
5
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ronald In de Braekt100.34
Nhien-An Le-Khac222449.63
Jason Farina300.34
Mark Scanlon42310.74
M. Tahar Kechadi532659.59