Design of a Digital Forensics Evidence Reconstruction System for Complex and Obscure Fragmented File Carving

Abstract

Fragmented file carving is an important technique in Digital Forensics to recover files from their fragments in the absence of the file system allocation information. In this paper, we proposed a system design for solving the fragmented file carving problem taking into consideration, conditions of real-life fragmentation scenarios. We developed our evidence reconstruction and recovery system, and carried out experiments, to evaluate the capability in detecting and recovering obscured evidence. The results showed that our system is able to achieve a higher efficiency and accuracy (e.g. 1.5 minutes for the reconstruction of each highly fragmented and deleted (obscured) image in its entirety or 100% recovery), when compared with the commercial recovery system, Adroit Photo Forensics (e.g. 2.8 minutes and 6.3 minutes for a partial image recovery or failure in recovery, respectively).