Digital Forensics - Computer and Network

**3**

**Chapter 1**

**Abstract**

Advancing Automation in Digital

In the last few years, most of the data such as books, videos, pictures, medical and even the genetic information of humans are moving toward digital formats. Laptops, tablets, smartphones and wearable devices are the major source of this digital data transformation and are becoming the core part of our daily life. As a result of this transformation, we are becoming the soft target of various types of cybercrimes. Digital forensic investigation provides the way to recover lost or purposefully deleted or hidden files from a suspect's device. However, current man power and government resources are not enough to investigate the cybercrimes. Unfortunately, existing digital investigation procedures and practices require huge interaction with humans; as a result it slows down the process with the pace digital crimes are committed. Machine learning (ML) is the branch of science that has governs from the field of AI. This advance technology uses the explicit programming to depict the human-like behaviour. Machine learning combined with automation in digital investigation process at different stages of investigation has significant potential to aid digital investigators. This chapter aims at providing the research in machine learning-based digital forensic investigation, identifies the gaps, addresses

**Keywords:** digital forensic investigation, machine learning, evidence extraction,

Worldwide usage of mobile smart devices has increased dramatically over the past two decades and is becoming the part of our daily life. The term smart device ranges from variety of devices that includes mobile phones, smartphones, tablets, GPS and so on. The popularity of these smart devices is increased significantly due to their processing power, huge storage capabilities and less cost. Consequently, they can hold the enormous amount of commercial and private user's data. These devices are the essential part of our daily life because they contain private and essential information of users. However, these devices are also vulnerable to attackers and are often becoming the major part of criminal's activities, IP theft, intrusions, security threats, accidents reconstructions and many more. The number of digital crimes equally increases as the new technologies, i.e. digital devices and

Forensic Investigations Using

Machine Learning Forensics

*Salman Iqbal and Soltan Abed Alharbi*

the challenges and open issues in this field.

cybercrimes, automated data extraction

**1. Introduction**
