Digital forensic application requirements specification process

Abstract

The requirement to identify the cause of an incident, following the trail of events preceding an incident, as well as proving the consistency of the potential evidence recovered from the alleged incident, ultimately demand a proactive approach towards the design of digital forensic (DF) applications. Adding legal and scientific processes capable of absorbing the constant upgrade and update of digital devices that are accessory to the perpetration of digital crimes, complements the existing DF processes and standards. However, there is the need for such processes to be clearly defined in order to accommodate the non-technical stakeholders involved in digital crime investigations and decisions. To overcome the identified challenges, the current study proposes a digital forensic application requirements specification (DFARS) process. The DFARS process shows an easy-to-follow process that is comprehensible to both technical and non-technical stakeholders of digital forensics, while ensuring an easy-to-adopt design process when an updated component of a digital device is up for development. The applicability of the DFARS process is further demonstrated using an online neighbourhood watch (ONW) system as a case scenario. The ONW system is a DF application that crowd-sources for potential digital evidence (PDE) of neigbourhood crime. Using the DFARS process enhances the modifiability, pluggability and reliability features of the ONW system and any DF application.