Gathering Evidence: Model-Driven Software Engineering in Automated Digital Forensics

Jeroen van den Bos

Promotor: prof.dr. P. Klint (UvA and CWI)
Copromotor: dr. T. van der Storm (CWI)
Universiteit van Amsterdam
Date: 9 January, 2014, 10:00
Thesis: PDF

Summary

Digital forensics concerns the acquisition, recovery and analysis of information stored on digital devices for the purpose of answering legal questions. Exponential increases in available storage capacity and network bandwidth, as well as growing device and service adoption by the public, have made manual inspection of all potentially relevant information infeasible in nearly all cases. A solution to this problem is automated digital forensics, which is the use of software to perform tasks in digital forensics automatically, reducing the time required to get results.

Many software engineering techniques exist that allow the construction of high performance and scalable solutions in the domain of digital forensics. Unfortunately, another major requirement complicates the application of most techniques: high variability in the shape of how investigated information is stored. The amount of different devices, networks, platforms, and applications is huge and constantly in motion. This leads to a constant stream of required changes to digital forensics software in order to recover as much information as possible.

Factoring out this variability so that the constantly changing aspects of a solution can evolve separately from the other parts is a supposed strength of model-driven software engineering (MDSE). This separation of concerns is achieved through the use of a domain-specific language (DSL), which is a custom notation used to specify the changing parts of a solution. Changes expressed in this DSL are then automatically applied through the use of transformation tools such as code generators and interpreters, which handle fixed requirements such as high performance.

This thesis presents analyses and experiments that were performed in order to discover if and how model-driven software engineering can be used in the development and maintenance of solutions in the domain of automated digital forensics.
The contributions are the following:

  • Domain analyses to establish initial requirements, including the domain of automated digital forensics in general, and data recovery and aspects of binary file formats in particular. Specific areas of interest are identified for the development of binary file format validators, including magic numbers, data dependencies, internal verification, output analysis, and data decoding.
  • Implementation of a DSL to describe binary file formats, applied in a forensic data recovery tool called a file carver. Experimental evaluation shows that the proposed model-driven approach has no negative effects on the runtime performance and data recovery qualities of the final solution, but does allow clear separation of concerns and requires a smaller amount of code to maintain.
  • Implementation of a set of model transformations to let the user of the file carver trade accuracy of data recovery for runtime performance, without requiring changes by a software engineer. Experimental evaluation on a custom benchmark shows that runtime performance gains of up to a factor of three can be achieved, at the expense of up to 8% in precision and 5% in recall.
  • Design of an experimental approach to observe the maintenance characteristics of a DSL, by generating realistic maintenance scenarios from a corpus of representative inputs. Application of the approach on the proposed DSL, which shows that it can accommodate all expected changes, but also identifies three language features to consider for further improvement.
  • Implementation of an integrated development environment (IDE) that provides the DSL user with a fully synchronized view of all relevant information during development and maintenance. This includes syntax-colored views of the static file format description, the dynamic data recovery program state, as well as the input data.

Additionally, the entire research presented in this thesis forms a single and extensive case study in the application of MDSE in the domain of automated digital forensics, using the Rascal metaprogramming language. It contributes evidence for the successful application of MDSE in general, as well as in the domain of automated digital forensics in particular. The relatively small and versatile implementations provide a strong case for the usefulness and applicability of Rascal in DSL engineering.