Abstract
Due to its critical role in cybersecurity, digital forensics has received significant attention from researchers and practitioners alike. The ever increasing sophistication of modern cyberattacks is directly related to the complexity of evidence acquisition, which often requires the use of several technologies. To date, researchers have presented many surveys and reviews on the field. However, such articles focused on the advances of each particular domain of digital forensics individually. Therefore, while each of these surveys facilitates researchers and practitioners to keep up with the latest advances in a particular domain of digital forensics, the global perspective is missing. Aiming to fill this gap, we performed a qualitative review of all the relevant reviews in the field of digital forensics, determined the main topics on digital forensics topics and identified their main challenges. Despite the diversity of topics and methods, there are several common problems that are faced by almost all of them, with most of them residing in evidence acquisition and pre-processing due to counter analysis methods and difficulties of collecting data from devices, the cloud etc. Beyond pure technical issues, our study highlights procedural issues in terms of readiness, reporting and presentation, as well as ethics, highlighting the European perspective which is traditionally stricter in terms of privacy. Our extensive analysis paves the way for closer collaboration among researcher and practitioners among different topics of digital forensics.
Highlights
According to Edmond Locard’s exchange principle, in every crime, the perpetrator will alter the crime scene by bringing something and leaving something else [1], [2]
Motivated by the lack of a general view of the digital forensics ecosystem, mainly because different topics are explored in an isolated way and aiming to answer several research questions/concerns, this manuscript seeks to fill a literature gap by proposing a review of reviews in the field of digital forensics
Following a thorough research methodology, we identified the main digital forensics topics
Summary
According to Edmond Locard’s exchange principle, in every crime, the perpetrator will alter the crime scene by bringing something and leaving something else [1], [2]. These changes can be used as forensic evidence. While this principle is relatively straightforward, it is difficult in many cases to apply. This is why Locard introduced forensics labs in Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) over the first decade. The introduction of the IBM PC generalised the use of computing machines; more interest was focused on digital evidence and many people came together and created a digital forensics community, which eventually became more
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