Faster File Imaging Framework for Digital Forensics

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.