A Review of Graph Theoretic and Weightage Techniques in File Carving

Abstract

Digital Forensics is a platform that helps in assisting investigation carried out in computer crimes through the recovery of material that is found in digital devices. Material is recovered through a method known as file carving that helps to recover data from storage media. Moreover, it also retrieves the extract hidden, overwritten or deleted files. File carving enables the file recovery without knowledge about contextual information such as file system metadata. Due to recent expansion in the research of information technology, file carving has become an essential technique for general data recovery and digital forensics investigations. Therefore, considering the important role played by file carving the present study conducted a survey of the previous literature to find out various data carving techniques. Results, from the previous literature helped to provide several algorithms for image construction which are based on graph theoretic techniques. Furthermore, the present study classifies the file carving techniques for JPEG file into two categories namely basic carving technique and advanced carving technique. The paper concludes by providing limitations in the present study which could be helpful for future investigations associated with the fragmentation problem of data files.