Open Research Topics

Research Ideas

Interested in doing research in computer forensics? Looking for a master's topic, or just some ideas for a research paper? Here is my list. Please feel free to add your own ideas.

Hard Problems

• Stream Based Disk Forensics. Process the entire disk with one pass, or at most two, to minimize seek time.
• Determine the device that created an image or video without metadata. (fingerprinting digital cameras)
• Automatically detect falsified digital evidence.
• Use the location of where data resides on a computer as a way of inferring information about the computer's past.
• Detect and diagnose sanitization attempts.
• Recover overwritten data.

Tool Development

AFF Enhancement

• Evaluation of the AFF data page size. What is the optimal page size for compressed forensic work?
• Replacement of the AFF "BADFLAG" approach for indicating bad data with a bitmap.
• Modify aimage so that it can take a partial disk image and a disk and just image what's missing.
• Improve the data recovery features of aimage.
• Replace AFF's current table-of-contents system with one based on B+ Trees.

Decoders and Validators

• A JPEG decompresser that supports restarts and checkpointing for use in high-speed carving. It would also be useful it the JPEG decompressor didn't actually decompress --- all it needs to do is to verify the huffman table.

Cell Phones

Open source tools for:

• Imaging the contents of a cell phone memory
• Reassembling information in a cell phone memory

Corpora Development

Realistic Corpora

• Simulated disk imags
• Simulated network traffic

Real Data

• Digital Cameras
• Cell phones
• USB Memory Sticks below the logical layer.