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Evidence is the key to solve any crime. Evidence integrity needs to be protected in order to make it admissible in the court of law. Digital evidence is more revealing, but it is fragile; it can easily be tampered with or modified. There are different techniques available to protect the integrity of digital evidence. Different automated digital evidence acquisition tools are available in the market. In this paper, we have analyzed two automated tools (EnCase and FTK Imager) that are used for disk imaging. These tools claim to protect the integrity of digital evidence. The techniques used by these tools are analyzed in this paper. Problems with their approaches are discussed and a solution is proposed to address the problems. A prototype of an automated tool is developed with an implementation of the proposed solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces the British Library’s Flashback project, which is exploring the practical challenges of preserving digital content currently stored on physical media (magnetic and optical disks). It reports on a Flashback proof of concept that conducted experiments on a sample of content from hybrid collection items dating from between 1980 and 2000. It describes some of the activities undertaken by the proof-of-concept stage of the project from July 2015 to February 2016, including the initial collection profiling and sampling of content, the extraction of content from the disks, and the project team’s experiments with identifying and applying preservation approaches to the content, which included both emulation and migration. It concludes with some general observations on the approaches taken by the proof of concept and shares some recent findings from the second phase of the project, which is concerned with the practical challenges of developing an implementation strategy for the Library’s capture and preservation of digital content currently stored on physical media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although libraries maintain collections of material on computer disks in climate controlled environments, a significant amount of digital heritage is in private collections. In this study we compared the outcomes of creating disk images of the State Library of South Australia’s born digital collections with those of a private collector to gauge the effect of long term storage conditions. The failure rates of both collections give cause for concern, and the results from the private collection are alarming. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The use of digital forensics tools has become common in typical crime investigations involving computing and communication devices. As with any evidence in criminal investigations, the preservation of digital evidence is of critical importance for the success of the investigation. Cryptographic Hash Functions (CHFs) are used by digital forensic tools to ensure the preservation of digital evidence during the acquisition and analysis of evidence. These tools make the use of the CHFs during the acquisition process to ensure that the created image of the evidence is accurate. The CHFs that are currently in use are serial in nature and can be time consuming when working with the large data sets. We propose a new parallel CHF transformation to speed up the image creation process by a factor of 6.5 over existing methods. We discuss the use of the parallel algorithm in the image creation process and compare the results with the existing sequential methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the Advanced Forensic Format (AFF), which is designed as an alternative to current proprietary disk image formats. AFF offers two significant benefits. First, it is more flexible because it allows extensive metadata to be stored with images. Second, AFF images consume less disk space than images in other formats (e.g., EnCase images). This paper also describes the Advanced Disk Imager (AImage),a new program for acquiring disk images that compares favorably with existing alternatives., Engineering and Applied Sciences