Advanced File Carving Approaches for Multimedia Files

File carving is a recovery technique that recovers files based on information about their structure and content without matching file system information. As files can be recovered from their content and/or file structure this technique is indispensable during digital forensics investigations. So far many approaches for the recovery of digital images have been proposed. The main contribution of this paper is a discussion of existing and new approaches for the recovery of multimedia files. After a short discussion of relevant multimedia file formats we present an overview of the current state-of-the-art in file carving. In the main part we focus on the implementation of a file carver for fragmented multimedia files. Finally, we summarize our findings and give an outlook with regard to post-processing files that have been recovered successfully.