Expanding digital forensics education with artifact curation and scalable, accessible exercises via the Artifact Genome Project

Abstract

Digital Forensics (DF) is a multidisciplinary domain that involves computing, law, criminology and other disciplines. At the core of the domain, however, is the Acquisition, Authentication and Analysis (AAA) of digital evidence. In the real world, practitioners typically find data of forensic value in DF artifacts. While this is true, educational programs and resources have not kept up with DF artifacts - which are the cornerstone of real-world investigations. Our work transforms and expands DF education by focusing the community's attention to artifacts. By leveraging our past work on the Artifact Genome Project (AGP), we expanded the platform to house educational modules that can be created and taken by any user or organization that has been vetted and met our standards to do so. Hundreds of curated DF artifacts have been added to the platform, and along with other educational resources, they have been employed to design scalable, self-paced, open, online DF educational modules. Our work was tested and put into practice in real-world scenarios around the world. This includes using the AGP platform to host the first DF challenge at the 2020 Interpol Digital Forensics Expert Group (DFEG) Conference and the 2021 DFRWS APAC Conference's annual Forensics Rodeo. Furthermore, we implemented the platform in DF courses at our own university. Feedback from these experiences was collected through surveys and in summary, the results show that there is a need for these type of educational resources in our community. While we observed that some improvements needed to be made either in the materials or platform, overall, participants benefited from the experience regardless of having zero to many years practicing on the field.