Current Challenges and Future Research Areas for Digital Forensic Investigation

TL;DR

The paper discusses the rising challenges in digital forensic investigations due to increasing digital evidence sources and complexity, highlighting the need for future research to improve efficiency and address backlogs.

Contribution

It identifies current technical challenges in digital forensics and proposes future research directions to enhance investigation efficiency and manage growing evidence complexity.

Findings

Digital evidence backlog is increasing globally.

New digital evidence sources pose identification and analysis challenges.

Future research can improve digital forensic processes.

Abstract

Given the ever-increasing prevalence of technology in modern life, there is a corresponding increase in the likelihood of digital devices being pertinent to a criminal investigation or civil litigation. As a direct consequence, the number of investigations requiring digital forensic expertise is resulting in huge digital evidence backlogs being encountered by law enforcement agencies throughout the world. It can be anticipated that the number of cases requiring digital forensic analysis will greatly increase in the future. It is also likely that each case will require the analysis of an increasing number of devices including computers, smartphones, tablets, cloud-based services, Internet of Things devices, wearables, etc. The variety of new digital evidence sources pose new and challenging problems for the digital investigator from an identification, acquisition, storage and analysis perspective. This paper explores the current challenges contributing to the backlog in digital forensics from a technical standpoint and outlines a number of future research topics that could greatly contribute to a more efficient digital forensic process.