Report Section

Future of Forensics

Today, everything is merging towards IT field for this reason digital forensics will play an important role in the near future because as we all know technology as a whole has been and still is a big impact on the world to the point of that the use of computers has completely changed the way people live, work and play. In particular, computers have affected businesses in many ways, allowing them to run more efficiently thus we can see that the science of digital forensics has a seemingly limitless future and as technology advances it will also expand as well. Although that is true it is also true that computers have a dark side because individuals can use them to conduct malicious assaults which includes hacking, fraud, identity theft, and many other activities. To catch these individuals and bring them to justice we use digital forensics tools for gathering information from their computers but recent digital forensics tools are too complicated to use and very expensive, in addition it needs users to be skilled to use them due to this some countries are avoiding using digital forensics for collecting evidence and instead they use simple investigations which might be wrong and might not be accepted in trial cases. Moreover traditional criminal investigations need the support of digital evidence collection tools and techniques; so in the future digital forensic and analysis tools will become common and it does not need to be highly detailed or expensive to provide users with complete and easy-to-understand data. It is also important to know that digital forensics is not only being used for cybercrime cases, but the techniques are also being used for no investigative purposes for example data mapping for security and privacy risk assessment therefore digital forensics is changing from an investigation mechanism to a prevention mechanism. Therefore, by utilizing computer forensics techniques, companies can do a better job at protecting themselves against potential threats from hackers and angry employees. In addition, digital forensics tools can be used when important files have been accidentally deleted as a result of hardware failure.

It is expected that in 5 years there two things that are going to develop in regards to digital forensics. First is the hardware and second is tools of digital forensics which means even if the data increases the job of the tools will take about the same effort as it does now.

Hardware; - we mean the size of storage media, memory and the speed of processors:

·         Computers will be 7 or 8 times faster

·         Storage data will increase up to 5tb or more

·         Capacity flash drives will be able to hold more 250GB of data

·         It will hold a lot of data and accommodate more input from the user

·         Computer forensics job will involve analyzing many times and more data than today.

Digital forensics tools;-

·         Will be about 5 times as fast

·         Twice as sophisticated

·         Cost of forensics software will be less than now

·         Open Source forensic software will be existing for free for those want to learn and use it.

In addition the future standardized tools and methods will ease the job for network researchers and will improve the judicial system itself. For this reason the uae digital forensics field is starting to become more realized so the government of uae is interested in this field therefore it started consulting professional it security professors to start teaching it in the universities and provide the necessary tools and equipment to teach this subject specially police and military. Moreover some universities began sending students to other advanced countries that it specialized in teaching this subject which will lastly lead to the improvement of the judicial system of the uae.

When solving existing and possible future issues of Digital Forensics there are the concept behind the Memristor that has been hiding around for a long time, but they will start to be built. “HP's recent achievements in this technology will drastically change the face of computing in the years to come”; (Craig Wright, 2008) at the same time it will allow Moore's law to continue which in turn will accelerate the advance of storage and memory space. When used with Moore’s law, Memristors will be able to combine several advantages of memory and disk based storage into a single unit. “Basically, think of combining a flash hard drive and DRAM into one package”. (Craig Wright, 2008)