Digital Forensics: Validation and Verification in a Dynamic Work Environment

Many forensic computing practitioners work in a high workload and low resource environment. With the move by the discipline to seek ISO 17025 laboratory accreditation, practitioners are finding it difficult to meet the demands of validation and verification of their tools and still meet the demands of the accreditation framework. Many agencies are ill-equipped to reproduce tests conducted by organizations such as NIST since they cannot verify the results with their equipment and in many cases rely solely on an independent validation study of other peoples´ equipment. This creates the issue of tools in reality never being tested. Studies have shown that independent validation and verification of complex forensic tools is expensive and time consuming, and many practitioners also use tools that were not originally designed for forensic purposes. This paper explores the issues of validation and verification in the accreditation environment and proposes a paradigm that will reduce the time and expense required to validate and verify forensic software tools