Developing Regional Networks For Collaboration

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Digital Forensics:

Developing regional networks for collaboration

Digital Forensics or formerly known as Digital Forensics Science according to Digital Forensics Research Workshop (2001) is the impact of methods toward the preservation, analysis, collection, validation, identification, interpretation, documentation and presentation of digital evidence that comes from digital sources to facilitate the reconstruction of events for anticipation towards unauthorized actions that disrupt planned operations. The purpose of this paper is to justify a solution to develop regional networks for collaboration within the infrastructure of digital forensics organizations and/or institution.

Within the infrastructure of digital forensics, (Ovenden et al., 2010) every institutions are not fully achieved the capability of maintaining and supporting the infrastructure of digital forensics and also for every institution, the identical skill and technique within them are not necessary. In summary, the key aspects of digital forensics are to ensure that the research to advance the discipline until the highest possible adoption rate by practitioners.

Introduction

According to recent findings, Ovenden et al. (2010) explains that every archivist who handled the project of processing Digital Forensics analysis will need a massive connection from regional networks for knowledge expansion but, it seems like the local environment itself is missing the point of doing it. Carrier (2001) found that in a simple case that mostly occurred, an investigator can view files and directories from a suspected system by using specialized forensic software and/or Operating System (OS) by mounting the hard drive. These methods allow the investigator to discovered evidence in it, but only the specialized forensic software that able to recover from the unallocated files. Since additional tools are required, if an OS is set as the basis the possibilities is there, but it need to be in manual maneuver.

Since (Biggs, 2010, pp. 2) corporations started to utilize computers in the course of doing business, cyber-crime keeps increasing in complexity and financial costs. This is the reason why investigators and/or archivist were stuck to their preferences of techniques and dependencies upon specifics tool to execute the digital forensics procedure and more importantly the lack of defense mechanism appliance. Digital Forensics is integral to society as, without it, solving crimes would be really hard but, (Casey, 2008, pp. 4) setting an absolute standard that dictates preserve data but alteration is prohibited is inconsistent with other forensic disciplines but also quite dangerous in legal context. Conforming to such a standard may be impossible but, summarizing this standard as the best practice will only lead digital evidence to criticism from the society. Within the IT industry, defending networks towards threats has become one of the most important tasks. Since, the lack of security mechanism on networks nowadays, the perpetrator can easily remain stealthy in any condition due to this weakness within the networks.

International Impact Implication

Within international coverage, Shield et al (no date, pp. 4) founds that proposed forensic techniques are easily failed with only limited technical knowledge. Even though this manpower can predict the worst case scenario using forensic mechanisms to address the common case scenario depends on their experiences, cooperation with each country is truly complicated since there are protocols that need to be followed. In the end, INTERPOL is the only organization that could conduct full cooperation in international matter.

In contrast of the argument above, here is a simple example, (Eisenbarth et al., 2008) despite power monitoring attacks; most people do not use tamper-proof hardware. Various forms of the (Donceur, 2002) Sybil Attack succeed and are (BBC News, 2003) used against Google, (Cheng, 2005) EBay, and (Isdal et al., 2007) p2p file sharing networks but, these systems enjoy great success. The privacy network is designed to provide reasonable performance instead of perfect security against known attacks.

National Impact Implication

Based on the fact finding, (IMPACT (International Multilateral Partnership Against Cyber Threats), 2012) the impact of Digital Forensics in national scope result as International Multilateral Partnership Against Cyber Threats (IMPACT) as cyber-security executing arm of the United Nation's specialized agency for ICTs and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) as the world's first wide-ranging alliance against cyber threats. IMPACT brings together governments, academic and industry experts to enhance the community's capabilities in dealing with cyber threats.

Based in Cyberjaya, Malaysia, IMPACT is the operational home of ITU's Global Cyber-security Agenda (GCA). IMPACT offers ITU's Member States with access to expertise, facilities and resources to effectively allocating cyber threats, as well as assisting United Nations agencies in consoling their ICT infrastructures.

Society Implication

Within the society, Digital Forensics network is all about the access for sharing information all around the world. In this point, according to Directorate-General for Research and Innovation (2012), the polling result towards the society implication and impact could be categorized as,

Publication Access. According to Directorate-General for Research and Innovation (2012), the reason this kind of problem arise is because the access blocked since the policies between the publisher and the societies was too strict since the need to keep everything save to avoid any panic within the society itself (Figure 1). Even though that within the citizens itself, they got their own belief in publication subscription is necessary, but mostly the government itself appeared to be aware that the perpetrator might be reduced, but the opposite might occur that the heavy-hitter will be in favor according to this matter.

Figure 1: Citizens Survey Pools upon Scientific Publication in Digital Science

Research Data Access. Within the societies, generally the access towards the research data is within the gray territories as shown in Figure 2. Since some of the research data lack of confidentiality, the society itself would like the government to provide an adequate guidelines and policies for them so that they could overcome the potential problem.

Figure 2: Citizens Survey Pools upon Access to Digital Science: Research Data

Digital Forensics Preservation. Digital Forensics preservation is important, because the information itself could be fallen into the wrong hand if it is not sufficiently addressed. Within the survey data, the societies especially the citizens are concerns about the quality of digital forensics repositories (Figure 3). Since they are also the taxpayers within the country, they demand that they must have a right to access the results of the research so that they could learn something new for their future awareness towards their own societies.

Figure 3: Citizens Survey Preservation of Digital Scientific Information

IT industry implication

Protection systems recently teach us that by offering networks for collaboration and information exchange are vulnerable from attacks and misuse. (Memon et al., 2003) Therefore, defending the threats to networks has become one of the most important tasks of several government and private sector. Due to lack of security mechanism on those networks, it provides an excellent cloak for perpetrators to remain anonymous before, during, and after their attacks. It is not only unable to prevent the attacks but also unable to identify the source of the attacks.

In order to guarantee the security and the survival of future networks we need to fix and upgrade the defensive mechanisms with additional capabilities for tracing inbounds that came from the perpetrator within the wide area networks such as, controlling the growth of (Winter, 1998) network traffic that out-paces Moore’s law, improving network packet-log accuracy by using categorized server for share logging mechanism and lastly, increasing response time by planting multiple domains tracker to inflict passive tracking activity towards the perpetrator.

Conclusion

Since there are a lot of investigators working in different organizations and different goals, (Clay Shield et al., no date, pp. 4) they may not be willing or able to collaborate with one another. Sharing of data across institutional boundaries is not always feasible or even legal. Wide-scale intrusion usually required a network-wide packet inspection for a massive surveillance campaign. Monitoring of this scope could never be lawful for law enforcement without a court order.

These systems are still useful, outside of the criminal investigation context. Private organizations could collect this data and use it internally to improve security and performance however, they cannot collect it at police request even though, as that would turn these organizations to be de facto agents of the law. This is a fact when it might expose the organization to legal jeopardy but, the only way to breakthrough this condition is by seeking cooperation from the legal parties that have the reach towards the global scale.

Reference

BBC News (2003). ‘Miserable failure’ links to Bush. [Online] Available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3298443.stm (Accessed at: 20 March 2013).

Biggs, S. (2010) Cyber Crime: Its Impact on Government, Society and the Prosecutor, pp. 2.

Brian Carrier (2003) Defining Digital Forensic Examination and Analysis Tools Using Abstraction Layers, pp. 1.

Casey, E. and Stellatos, G.J. (2008) The Impact of Full Disk Encryption on Digital Forensics, pp. 4.

Cheng, A. and Friedman, E. (2005). Sybil-proof Reputation Mechanisms, Econ of P2P Systems, pp. 128–132.

Digital Forensics Research Workshop (2001) "A Road Map for Digital Forensics Research", pp. 22.

Directorate-General for Research and Innovation (2012) Online survey on scientific information in the digital age, pp. 19 – 42.

Douceur, J. (2002). The Sybil Attack, Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS).

Eisenbarth, T., Kasper, T., Moradi, A., Paar, C., Salmasizadeh, M. and Shalmani, M. (2008). On the Power of Power Analysis in the Real World, pp. 203 - 220.

IMPACT (International Multilateral Partnership Against Cyber Threats) (2012). ITU-IMPACT Info Pack [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.impact-alliance.org/media/whats-new.html (Accessed at: 30 March 2013).

Kirschenbaum M.G., Ovenden, R., and Redwine G. (2010) Digital Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections, pp. 62.

Piatek, M., Isdal, T., Anderson, T., Krishnamurthy, A. and Venkataramani, A. (2007) Do Incentives Build Robustness in BitTorrent, USENIX NSDI Symposium, pp. 1 - 14.

Shanmugasundaram, K., Memon, N., Savant, A. and Bronnimann, H. (2003) ForNet: A Distributed Forensics Network, pp. 1.

Winter R. and Auerbach, K. (1998) The big time: 1998 winter vldb survey. Database Programming Design.

Walls, R.J., Levine, B.N., Liberatore, N. and Shield, C. (no date) Effective Digital Forensics Research is Investigator-Centric, pp. 4 - 6.