The Proactive and Reactive Digital Forensics Investigation Process: A Systematic Literature Review

Recent papers have urged the need for new forensic techniques and tools able to investigate anti-forensics methods, and have promoted automation of live investigation. Such techniques and tools are called proactive forensic approaches, i.e., approaches that can deal with digitally investigating an incident while it occurs. To come up with such an approach, a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) was undertaken to identify and map the processes in digital forensics investigation that exist in literature. According to the review, there is only one process that explicitly supports proactive forensics, the multi-component process [1]. However, this is a very high-level process and cannot be used to introduce automation and to build a proactive forensics system. As a result of our SLR, a derived functional process that can support the implementation of a proactive forensics system is proposed.