Summary:
Digital forensic investigation requires the investigator to examine the forensic image of the seized storage media or device. The investigator gets full access to all the data contained in the forensic image including the suspect’s private or sensitive data that may be entirely unrelated to the given case. The unrestricted access to the forensic image becomes a significant threat to the suspect’s data privacy because the investigator can view or copy the data at will. There is no legal or technical structure in place to stop such abuse. The paper presents a study containing three different surveys, one for each stakeholder in a digital forensic investigation, namely the investigators, the cyber lawyers and the general public, that aim to capture respective perceptions of data privacy during the investigation process. The responses show a lack of professional ethics among some of the investigators, lack of legal support to protect data privacy for lawyers and confusion among the general public regarding their data privacy rights. The findings indicate towards the pressing need for a privacy-preserving digital forensic investigation framework that protects data privacy without compromising on investigator’s efficiency and performance during the digital forensic investigation. The authors have also proposed a simple yet efficient solution approach that neither causes any harm to the efficiency of the investigator nor restricts the outcome of the overall investigation process.
Publication Type: Conference
Publication Date: January 6th, 2016
Publisher: Twelfth Annual IFIP WG 11.9 International Conference on Digital Forensics
Author(s): Dr. Jayaprakash G., Dr.. Gauarav Gupta, Dr. Robin Verma
Links:
Data Privacy Perceptions About Digital Forensic Investigations in India | Request PDF (researchgate.net)
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