Literature Survey on Digital Forensics and Anti - Forensics

Abstract

Forensics or Forensic science is an arena of science that deals with investigation of any unlawful activity and to present it as evidence in court of law. Increased use of digital devices, especially computers, makes man's life easy but also vulnerable. Modern forms of crime, with either computer as an instrument or computer as the target, broadly called the computer crimes or cyber crimes are increasing in number and severity. To combat cyber crime, an active topic of research called Digital forensics came into play. The goal of digital forensics is to answer the five questions - Why? Who? Where? When? and How? related to the crime committed. This emerging field focuses on the tools and techniques that deal with identifying, preserving, extracting and documenting the evidence.

With the growth in knowledge of collecting evidence, knowledge of destroying data and metadata required to create evidence also grew. Anti-forensic or counter forensic study deals with the study of techniques and tools to confound an investigator. The proponents for privacy measure support anti-forensics. It talks about hiding or destroying the data and the metadata. On the whole it makes the process of acquiring evidence as complex as possible.

Tools that help users perform anti-forensics are called anti-forensic tools. Yet, there could be files and track evidences, accessed by hackers which could bring the activities of the user to limelight. Hence, analysis of these anti forensic tools comes with greater importance. Hence, the analysis of the tools is proposed.