Real-time digital forensics and triage

There are two main reasons the processing speed of current generation digital forensic tools is inadequate for the average case: a) users have failed to formulate explicit performance requirements; and b) developers have failed to put performance, specifically latency, as a top-level concern in line with reliability and correctness. In this work, we formulate forensic triage as a real-time computation problem with specific technical requirements, and we use these requirements to evaluate the suitability of different forensic methods for triage purposes. Further, we generalize our discussion to show that the complete digital forensics process should be viewed as a (soft) real-time computation with well-defined performance requirements. We propose and validate a new approach to target acquisition that enables file-centric processing without disrupting optimal data throughput from the raw device. We evaluate core forensic processing functions with respect to processing rates and show their intrinsic limitations in both desktop and server scenarios. Our results suggest that, with current software, keeping up with a commodity SATA HDD at 120 MB/s requires 120–200 cores. a 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.