Work Package 5 'Technical Issues' takes into account the digital evidence handling guidelines, the recommended technical specifications, the undertaken goal oriented analysis and the deriving and captured functional requirements in order to design and build a proof of concept application. The application aims to be the basis of a platform for experimentation and to assist the evaluation and validation of the proposed specifications with regards to the targeted end-user groups in the legal and jurisdiction domains.
Deliverable D5.2 described the requirements and architecture design of the Proof of Concept (PoC) application. The design follows the reasoning of the goal-oriented analysis and takes into account the results of the analysis of existing systems of important stakeholders (EUROJUST and INTERPOL). Therefore, following the requirements of the stakeholders, the PoC focuses on the metadata of the digital evidence exchange, the description and reproducibility of the analysis and the chain of custody. The aim is not to replace or attempt to compete with existing systems, but try to fill the gaps of functional and data format heterogeneity of existing systems by using standard, semantically rich protocols such as the DFAX language.
The document continues by providing the implementation details. The implementation section starts with the extensions and integration of the DFAX library. Then continues with the implementation of the proof of concept application and provides the details about its components, its data model, and describes its functionality. The PoC is developed using web technologies, which will make it available in a variety of system environments, hardware platforms and end-user devices. A popular with large community support platform has been chosen for its implementation. The PoC application helps users produce, manage, export and import structured documents that describe the evidence exchange and handling actions.
A secure packaging of the structured DFAX documents with the attached data elements is implemented in the PoC and there are possibilities of a secure exchange. Regarding the secure exchange the document also describes existing protocols and systems and continues with some suggestions of novel approaches for secure exchanging and data privacy preserving of forensic investigation documents.
In this experiment we have focused on filling the identified gap of capturing the investigation actions performed during the lifecycle of a judicial case. The Proof of Concept application is designed to facilitate exactly this process by providing a structure that guides the forensic investigators and a structured language that enables serialization of the investigation metadata, which means also packaging, sharing, reproducibility of results and in general facilitating exchange of digital evidence. Additionally, using a structure that has been approved by the forensics community would facilitate the integration of this technology with digital evidence exchange mechanisms and systems in place.
Summary of Deliverable D5.2 can be found at 'The Activities/Deliverables' Section.