Month: March 2014

The Importance of Forensic Tools Validation

I recently finished consulting on a rather high profile case, and once again found myself spending almost as much time correcting reports from third party forensic tools vendors as I did analyzing actual evidence. It’s even sadder that I charged less for my services than these tools manufacturers charge for a single license of their buggy software. I don’t say high profile to sound important, I say it because these types of cases are generally of great importance themselves, and you absolutely need the evidence to be accurate. Many in the law enforcement community have learned to “trust the tools”, citing scientific method and all that. The problem I’ve found throughout my entire career in forensics, however, has shown me quite the opposite. When it comes to forensic software, the judge should not automatically trust the forensic tools as part of the scientific process, and neither should the forensic examiners using them. Let me explain why…

In forensics, we often misplace our trust in tools that, unlike tried and true scientific methods, are usually closed source. While true scientific process relies on making our findings repeatable and verifiable, the methods to analyze data are sometimes patented, and almost always considered trade secrets. This is the complete opposite of the scientific method, where methods are fully explained and documented. In the software industry, repeatable is exactly what you don’t want your methods to be – especially by your competitors. The nature of secrecy in the software industry doesn’t rub well against the open scientific nature that you’d expect to find in forensic, or other scientific disciplines.As such, “software” is not scientific in nature, and should not be trusted using the same rules as science. Sure, we have some validation experts out there. NIST does a good job of validating logical data acquired from a number of devices and has struck some good and interesting results that have helped the industry. Even still, such tests are only a single data point on an ever evolving software manufacturing process riddled with regression bugs and programming errors that only show up in certain specific data sets.

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Recovering Photos From Bad Storage Cards

A Guide for Photogaphers, Not Geeks

Most photographers have had at least one heart attack moment when they realize all of the photos they’ve taken on a shoot (or a vacation) are suddenly gone, and there’s nothing on the camera’s storage card. Perhaps you’ve accidentally formatted the wrong card, or the card just somehow got damaged. If you’re a professional photographer, there’s a good chance your’e also not a forensic scientist or a hard-core nerd (although it’s OK to be all three!). That minor detail doesn’t mean, however, that you can’t learn to carve data off of a bad storage card and save yourself a lot of money on data recovery. While there are many aspects to forensic science that are extremely complicated, data carving isn’t one of them, and I’ll even walk you through how to do it on your Mac in this article, with a little bit of open source software and a few commands. If you’re scared of your computer, don’t worry. This is all very easy even though it looks a bit intimidating at first. You can test your skills using any old storage card you might have on hand. It doesn’t have to be damaged, although you might be surprised just how much data you thought was deleted from it!

First, lets talk about how your storage card works. When you plug your storage card into your computer, your computer looks for a list of files on the card; this is kind of like a rolodex of all the files your camera has stored. This “catalog” basically says, “OK, this file is this big, and it starts here”. You can think of it like the table of contents of a book. When you format a storage card, most of the time it’s just this table of contents that gets deleted; the actual bits and bytes from the photo you took aren’t erased (because that would take too long). The same can be true when the file system becomes damaged; in most cases, it’s just the file listing that gets blown up somehow, making it appear like there are no files on the card. In more extreme cases, physical damage can sometimes damage the data from one part of the card, but the data for the other half of the card can still be recovered; your computer needs to be told to look past all the damaged data, instead of just giving you an error message.

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Journal Paper Published

The International Journal of Digital Forensics and Incident Response has formally accepted and published my paper titled Identifying Back Doors, Attack Points, and Surveillance Mechanisms in iOS Devices. This paper is a compendium of services and mechanisms used by many law enforcement agencies and in open source, of modern forensic techniques to create a forensic Read More