Digital forensics is the study of electronic data for identifying the hidden elements or improving the existing element. It helps to recover the original content from degraded or erased data through a sequential investigation procedure.
‘The main objective is to find the evidence in available data and reconstruct the data into an original form for the court of law’.
Here, the investigation process involves data collection, identification, and justification.
How to Choose Project Topics in Digital Forensics?
- Identify the technological growth in Digital Forensics Final Year Project Ideas
- For instance, the latest ideas focus on event detection in surveillance/internet video, improvement of image interpretation, etc.
- Best to avoid the already proven topics/datasets
- Understand the comprehensive context information
- Narrow down the topic for a specific problem
- Create all the possible ideas and the select optimal one
- Determine the research objectives
- For instance: achievement of high reliability, accuracy, security, validity, etc.
- Outline the topic that implies the research problem/question
- Make the problem statement for your project
With an intention to address the different research issues in different forensics areas, we frame Digital Forensics Final Year Project Ideas. For that, we analyze the research gaps and ongoing research problems on digital forensics technology, measurements, and protocols.
How does computer forensics work?
Generally, the forensic analysers have implementation steps to do the investigation. And, it may be vary based on investigation data, device, and procedure. Here, we have given you the common three steps involved in forensic investigation.
- Evidence Collection
- Collect the digital data with the assurance of integrity
- Separate the device to be analyzed for security reasons
- Make the copy of original data and lock the accessibility of original data
- Electronically stored information must be collected in a way that maintains its integrity.
- In some cases, uses public / open information for analysis. For instance: Facebook
- Analysis of Different Digital Forensics
- Implement analysis techniques on copied image
- Utilize different tools for analysis
- Wireshark – analyze the network information and protocol
- Mouse Jiggler – protect the volatile data in computer’s sleep state / no power
- Technology’s Autospy – inspect the hard drive data
- Forensic Documentation and Inquiry
- Forensic analyzer prepare the report of investigation in legal proceedings
- Specify the overall recovered information
- Based on report, the court make the decision
In the above, we have seen only part of digital forensics. Now, we can see the overall steps of digital forensics applications. As mentioned earlier, forensic investigations are performed for law purposes. So, it is essential to maintain the evidence in high protection for the acceptance of court. Below, we have given you the procedure for digital forensics starting from evidence collection to presentation.
5 Steps in Digital Forensics Projects
- Detection – Identify and collect the data
- Storage – Securely store the collected data against interference
- Investigation – Analyze and reconstruct the data to attain conclusion
- Reporting – Record the information of reconstructed data
- Visualization– Present the overall evidences from conclusion
Generally, there are several types of digital forensics. Here, we have listed only two main classifications of digital forensics as sub-fields with their purpose. We support you not only in these two sub-fields but also in other types. If you want to know details about other types then approach us to implement digital forensics final year project ideas. We let you know all interesting facts about other types of digital forensics.
Classifications of Digital Forensics
- Host-based Forensics
- Analyze the criminal actions by computer-based data
- Network Forensics
- Analyze the criminal actions by session and traffic data
As mentioned earlier, the attacks are come from different sources. So, we need to collect and analyze the evidences in all respects. Here, we have listed multiple sources of forensic analysis that are commonly followed in digital forensics.
What are the different sources of forensic analysis?
- Email Messages
- Smartphone RSS Traces
- Virus and Malware
- Recorded video / voice
- Mobile / Tele Phone Contacts and Calls
- User Information (Credentials, Email, Access Time, Zone, etc.)
- Device Information (Device Name, Serial Number, Model, etc.)
- Application Information (registered Host / Users / Device name, Bearer token, etc.)
- Network Connectivity Information (Addresses of IP, MAC Gateway, Server, etc.)
- Others: Communication protocol type, data, etc.
So far, we have listed digital forensics in detail which comprises importance, major operations, development procedure, classification, and different sources of analysis. Now, we can see the technical issues associated with the digital forensics implementation (i.e., research challenges).
Recent Research Issues of Digital Forensics
- Device-oriented
- Insufficient Peripheral Devices
- Strategies of Anti-Forensics
- Source-oriented
- Law-oriented
- Evidence Presentation (Court)
- Evidence Confidentiality (Court)
Further, our experts have given you the top 12 security threats for forensic analysis. These threats are itemized only after conducting a deep study on recent research papers of digital forensic by our experts. We not only identified the threats but also the appropriate solutions based on current technologies.
Top 12 Threats for Forensic Analysis
- Advanced Persistent Threats
- Lack of Due Diligence
- Inaccessibility of Services
- Weak Credential Information
- Liabilities of Shared System
- Exploitation of Cloud Services
- Malicious Insiders and Outsiders
- Random Data Loss and Theft
- Account hijacking and Data breaches
- Denial of service (DoS) / Distributed DoS
- Susceptible points of System / Software
- Uncertain APIs and Software Application
For illustration purposes, here we have given the three different real-time scenarios of web-based attacks. From this, you can realize how the attacks are performed in a real-world environment.
Example Attack Scenarios in Digital Forensics
- Attack Scenario 1
- If the user fails to logout the session then attacker easily get into the application
- Properly utilize the “logout” option
- Attack Scenario 2
- Attempting to guess the password due to weak credential, constant use, etc.
- Utilize multi-factor authentication
- Attack Scenario 3
- Attempting to access the data through set of possible known passwords (credential stuffing)
- Utilize appropriate security scheme to validate the credentials
To the continuation, we have also given a few defensive measures to avoid security threats/attacks. When the following measures are employed in the organization, they will surely yield the best results.
What are the countermeasures for security threats?
- Collect the evidence sequentially
- Improve the accessibility of evidences
- Store the collected evidences in secure storage system
- Prepare the incident response for dynamic uncertainties
- Regularly the updates the hardware and software
Next, we can see in what way the cyber attackers are minimized with the help of digital forensics. It is somewhat similar to the above specified defensive measure but here we considered different parameters to enhance the security to prevent cyber attackers. Let’s have a look over them in the following,
How to mitigate the cyber attackers using digital forensics?
- Create the Device Lifecycle
- Compute the time duration of device investigation
- Device Space Definition
- State the IoT devices space for particular identification
- Discovery of Device Accessibility
- Detect and design the policies for device accessibility
- Data Classification
- Determine the data types for data framework creation
- Access Control
- To detect the network connection and separate specific device from connection
- To launch the data accessibility for external organization
- Make Accessibility
- Detect the availability of devices by means of privacy, security, authorization, etc.
For your awareness, we have given you growing technologies of digital forensics. These technologies have gained great development in recent days. So, both students and scholars are demanding their Digital Forensics Final Year Project Ideas in the following areas. We have countless innovative ideas in all the goring technologies which can be easily incorporated with digital forensics.
Top 15 Emerging Technologies for Digital Forensics Final Year Project Ideas
- Security by Blockchain Technology
- Advance Cyber Threat Intelligence
- Text based Mining in Digital Evidences
- Deleted Data Recovery Mechanism
- Forensic based User Behavior Analysis
- Comprehensive Study of Darknet
- Integration of Cloud in Mobile Forensics
- Evidence based Reconstruction
- Biometric Spoofing and Deepfake Detection
- Implementation of Artificial intelligence
- Security Measures against Malware
- Forensics Analysis on Streaming Multimedia
- IoT and Underwater Networks Forensics
- Employment of ML and DL Algorithms
- Data Presentation in Cyber Forensics
In addition, we have listed few up-to-date digital forensics project topics. Currently, these topics increase the interest of the students to choose digital forensics as their final year project research domain. For add-on benefits, we have also included the functionalities/significance of the topics.
Latest Project Topics on Digital Forensics
- Stochastic Forensics
- Usually, data theft is detected via digital artifacts left by attackers
- If the attacker is insider then there is no chance of artifacts so stochastic forensic is performed
- Investigate the breached data without artifacts
- Reverse Steganography
- General steganography – hide data in the image
- Reverse steganography- follow steganography process in reverse order through hashing
- Though the criminal hides the data in image, the hashed data will reveal the medication of image
- Image-assisted Biometric Identification
- Increase the quality of image for better understanding, interoperability, assessment, etc.
- Applications – Face, fingerprint, iris recognition
- Deep Learning (DL) oriented Forensic Analysis
- Estimate the attacker motive
- Find the relation of source and evidence
- Verification of source and proof
- Analyze the impact of attacks
- Provide comprehensive details about evidence
- Live Investigation
- For filtering volatile data (i.e., RAM / cache), analysis process directly takes place in forensics lab for privacy of evidences
- Cross-drive Forensic Analysis
- Find the relationship and similarities of information (multi-drives)
- Doubtful events are matched with drive data for anomaly detection
Next, we can see the few important datasets that are required for a digital forensics project. Equivalent to topic selection, dataset selection also has a main role in digital forensic project development. Since the investigation and performance of the system is majorly depends on datasets. So, our developers will help you to choose a suitable dataset for your project based on the project topic and requirements.
What are the datasets for digital forensics?
- Apple IPod Disk Images
- Database
- Android Application Packets (APK)
- Email Dataset
- Hard Disk Images Dataset
- Chat Logs
On the whole, once you make a bond with us, we assist you to select the latest project topic, research solutions (algorithms/techniques), development tool, dataset, platform/framework, etc. In other words, we guide you in every step of the research and project execution. Therefore, hold our hands to create the best Digital Forensics Final Year Project Ideas.
