CA17124 - Digital forensics: evidence analysis via intelligent systems and practices (DigForASP)

Digital Forensics is a part of the Criminalistics Sciences which deals with digital evidence recovery and exploitation in the solution of criminal cases through the application of scientific principles. There are several and increasingly sophisticated methods for collecting digital evidence. As a matter of fact, the evolution of technology continuously pushes such kind of methods. Rough evidence must however be used to elicit hypotheses concerning events, actions and facts (or sequences of them) with the goal to obtain evidence to present in court.  Evidence analysis involves examining fragmented incomplete knowledge, and reconstructing and aggregating complex scenarios involving time, uncertainty, causality, and alternative possibilities. No established methodology exists today for digital evidence analysis. The Scientific Investigation experts usually proceed by means of their experience and intuition.

The Challenge of the proposed COST Action consists in creating a Network for exploring the potential of the application of Artificial Intelligence and Automated Reasoning in the Digital Forensics field, and creating synergies between these fields. Specifically, the challenge is to address the Evidence Analysis phase, where evidence about possible crimes and crimes perpetrators collected from various electronic devices (by means of specialized software, and according to specific regulations) must be exploited so as to reconstruct possible events, event sequences and scenarios related to a crime. Evidence Analysis results are then made available to law enforcement, investigators, public prosecutors, lawyers and judges: it is therefore crucial that the adopted techniques guarantee reliability and verifiability, and that their result can be explained to the human actors.