Pros And Cons Of Digital Forensic Investigations

1. Introduction Mario Bunge, a pioneer in the philosophy of science stresses the importance of science. His work describes and analyzes the processes and methods of scientific research and provides a map to identify the various stages in the road to scientific knowledge. Bunge [1] states that science does not pretend to be the only truth but it claims that it is truer than any non-scientific model in the world. It is able to test this truth claim and to discover and correct its own shortcomings. What enables science to achieve its goal of the building of progressively true partial reconstruction of reality is its method. Many of the young fields of forensics - that have not yet achieved a scientific status - are constantly searching their

Most of the procedures used by currently available tools are not published or even thoroughly tested [3]. It is however crucial that the field have standardized methods. This method - by which digital data is accumulated and presented - will decide whether the evidence presented is admissible in a court of law and if a watertight case could be built by using it [4]. With court admissibility also comes the possibility of convicting a person for a crime. The inherent question remains, is the current process of digital forensic investigations accurate enough to be used to determine such an important outcome? This is one of the several arguments as to why there is a growing need to create a singular systematic approach that can be standardized to investigate, collect, analyze and present digital evidence. The question of how it will be decided, what criteria will be used to determine if the digital data collected can be considered ‘admissible’ or not is one that would be addressed by the formalization of such a systematic approach. A scholar and practitioner in the field of digital forensics, Brian Carrier is one of the experts working towards the creation of this systemic approach. Carrier’s contribution was to define a hypothesis–based approach to digital forensic investigations. His work suggests the formulation of different hypotheses during the course of a

For us as humans, at any given moment, “only a small portion of the field where our activities are displayed is perceptible to us, most of it, though existing on its own must be hypothetically reconstructed by us” [1]. It is our intuition to formulate different hypotheses when faced with solving a problem. Routine questions in other forensic disciplines include whether it is A's DNA/fingerprints found on the crime scene, whether a round was fired by a rifle of type B or even the specific rifle C, whether a given reconstruction of events is the only (or most likely) one given the physics of blood spatter analysis, etc. In digital forensics, investigations are started to answer questions about digital states and events. For example, "does file F exist?", "was event E caused by an attacker?", or "did program P generate this output?" [4]. Investigations are carried out to collect data that can be used as evidence in order to confirm or refute potential hypotheses about a digital crime [5]. The entire investigation proceeds by asking questions, guessing possible solutions based on the provided evidence and testing those guesses