When Digital Forensic Research Meets Laws

Academic researchers in digital forensics often lack backgrounds in related laws. This ignorance could make their research and development legally invalid, or with less relevance in practice. To better assist academic researchers, we discuss related laws that regulate the government´s investigation and summarize different requirements of acquiring data and evidence in different crime scene investigations. We show that certain strategies (including attacks against security systems) would violate relevant laws, and so law enforcement cannot use them to collect data. We recommend that researchers focus on crime scene investigations that do not need Warrant/Court Order/Subpoena for trace back related network forensics. This would help make their research and development accepted more easily by law enforcement with a larger impact.