Erratum to: File Type Identification for Digital Forensics

Abstract

In modern world the use of digital devices for leisure or professional reasons (computers, tablets and smartphones etc.) is growing quickly. Nevertheless, criminals try to fool authorities and hide evidence in a computer or any other digital device, by changing the file type. File type detection is a very demanding task for a digital forensic examiner. In this paper a new methodology is proposed - in a digital forensics perspective- to identify altered file types with high accuracy by employing computational intelligence techniques. The proposed methodology is applied in the four most common types of files (jpg, png and gif). A three stage process involving feature extraction (Byte Frequency Distribution), feature selection (genetic algorithm) and classification (neural network) is proposed. Experimental results were conducted having files altered in a digital forensics perspective and the results are presented. The proposed model shows very high and exceptional accuracy in file type identification.