Tuesday, October 2, 2018

Digital Forensics: Imaging of hard disk and other media

Disk Imaging is a fundamental process in digital forensics. Storage devices are one of the many evidences we encounter at the crime scene. It is of prime significance that every evidence needs to be handled with care and there should not occur any alteration during the investigation of digital crime. During digital investigation, there are chances that the data collected may get intentionally or accidentally destroyed, at such times; the evidence cannot be present in the court. Investigator has to follow the proper chain of custody. To avoid changes in seized storage devices one instruction that is to be followed by investigator is “DO NOT TOUCH THE ORIGINAL EVIDENCE”, it means that we are not suppose to perform any operation related to analysis directly on original device.

In disk imaging, we make exact copies of storage devices or its partition and then store it in a larger storage or directly burn it on another device. It looks like a copy- paste operation but it is not. In copy paste operation, we just move data from one location to another location but there is no possibility that the source addressing is maintained. Also in copy-paste operation, data existing on target location is not overwritten because it is stored only in free location. Whereas in cloning or imaging data and its location is considered. In an image, file data is stored along with its source location and in cloning process data from source will be replicated as it is and old address scheme is considered.

Let us learn through the given video lecture.


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