Digital Forensics in the Age of Big Data: Challenges, Approaches, and Opportunities

The age of big data opens new opportunities in various fields. While the availability of a big dataset can be helpful in some scenarios, it introduces new challenges in digital forensics investigations. The existing tools and infrastructures cannot meet the expected response time when we investigate on a big dataset. Forensics investigators will face challenges while identifying necessary pieces of evidence from a big dataset, and collecting and analyzing those evidence. In this article, we propose the first working definition of big data forensics and systematically analyze the big data forensics domain to explore the challenges and issues in this forensics paradigm. We propose a conceptual model for supporting big data forensics investigations and present several use cases, where big data forensics can provide new insights to determine facts about criminal incidents.