Dealing with terabyte data sets in digital investigations

Abstract

Investigators and analysts are increasingly experiencing large, even terabyte sized data sets when conducting digital investigations. State-of-the-art digital investigation tools and processes are efficiency constrained from both system and human perspectives, due to their continued reliance on overly simplistic data reduction and mining algorithms. The extension of data mining research to the digital forensic science discipline will have some or all of the following benefits: (i) reduced system and human processing time associated with data analysis; (ii) improved information quality associated with data analysis; and (iii) reduced monetary costs associated with digital investigations. This paper introduces data mining and reviews the limited extant literature pertaining to the application of data mining to digital investigations and forensics. Finally, it provides suggestions for applying data mining research to digital forensics. © 2006 International Federation for Information Processing.