Research trends, challenges, and emerging topics of digital forensics: A review of reviews

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive review of existing surveys in digital forensics, highlighting key topics, challenges, and the need for greater collaboration across different forensic domains to address complex cybersecurity issues.

Contribution

It offers a global perspective by synthesizing multiple reviews, identifying main topics and challenges, and emphasizing the importance of cross-topic research in digital forensics.

Findings

Digital forensics covers multiple complex domains.

Researchers often work in parallel without collaboration.

Cross-topic research can address shared challenges more effectively.

Abstract

Due to its critical role in cybersecurity, digital forensics has received significant attention from researchers and practitioners alike. The ever increasing sophistication of modern cyberattacks is directly related to the complexity of evidence acquisition, which often requires the use of several technologies. To date, researchers have presented many surveys and reviews on the field. However, such articles focused on the advances of each particular domain of digital forensics individually. Therefore, while each of these surveys facilitates researchers and practitioners to keep up with the latest advances in a particular domain of digital forensics, the global perspective is missing. Aiming to fill this gap, we performed a qualitative review of reviews in the field of digital forensics, determined the main topics on digital forensics topics and identified their main challenges. Our analysis provides enough evidence to prove that the digital forensics community could benefit from closer collaborations and cross-topic research, since it is apparent that researchers and practitioners are trying to find solutions to the same problems in parallel, sometimes without noticing it.