Title

Testing The Forensic Soundness Of Forensic Examination Environments On Bootable Media

Document Type

Article

Source of Publication

Digital Investigation

Publication Date

8-1-2014

Abstract

In this work we experimentally examine the forensic soundness of the use of forensic bootable CD/DVDs as forensic examination environments. Several Linux distributions with bootable CD/DVDs which are marketed as forensic examination environments are used to perform a forensic analysis of a captured computer system. Before and after the bootable CD/DVD examination, the computer system's hard disk is removed and a forensic image acquired by a second system using a hardware write blocker. The images acquired before and after the bootable CD/DVD examination are hashed and the hash values compared. Where the hash values are inconsistent, a differential analysis is performed on the image files. The differential analysis allows us to quantify and explain the alterations made to the image files by the bootable CD/DVD examination. Our approach can be used to experimentally validate new bootable CD/DVD distributions as forensically sound. (C) 2014 Digital Forensics Research Workshop. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

ISSN

1742-2876

Publisher

Elsevier Sci Ltd

Volume

11

First Page

S22

Last Page

S29

Disciplines

Computer Sciences

Keywords

Bootable examination environment, Bootable CD, Bootable DVD, Hash functions, Differential analysis

Indexed in Scopus

no

Open Access

no

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