Cluster Based Analysis of Digital Forensic Investigation

Abstract

Digital Forensic Investigation (DFI) is the investigation of crimes that involve the investigation of digital evidence, data and communication that are carried out on the suspectâAZs computers. DFI has become a research trend in the field of data mining because crimes ratio that carried out through computers is increasing. Moreover the essence of data mining in DFI is getting important because the capacity of computer storage and consequently size of data in computers are increasing with the passage of time. It becomes difficult to take the manual investigation of a computerâAZs data because it consumes too much time.In existing systems, data on crime scenes are retrieved from computers and clustered using clustering techniques on the basis of subjects defined by an investigator. The subjects are sensitive words related to the crimes. These clusters help in identifying relevant data on specific subjects which are useful for further investigation. The approach is also known as subject-based semantic document clustering.A drawback of the approach is that these generated clusters are concentrated on subjects, provided by the investigator and not on the subjects found from the suspectâAZs computer. In this research we have also applied subject-based semantic clustering on documents found in the suspectâAZs computer. In order to resolve the above mentioned issue, the proposed approach first analyses documents and recommends subjects to the investigator for his selection. Then the investigator provides subjects for clustering of documents. The proposed approach applies overlapping clusters on the provided subjects and generates another generic cluster of documents that do not fall in the clusters of provided subjects. In addition, the generic cluster can be further passed to another cycle of this process for additional investigation. The experimental results show that the proposed approach provides comparatively more accuracy and flexibility than the existing systems.