The Value of Metadata in Digital Forensics

Metadata is not visible when viewing data in a number of forms such as a word document or an image. It is, however, an important consideration in the discovery of information for use in digital forensic investigations. Different types of documents and files have a number of formats and types of metadata, which can be used to discover the properties of a file, document or network activity. Moreover, Metadata is useful in many circumstances, where it can provide collaboration evidence of between groups of people, because some of them are not aware of which type of information is stored within their document. Thus, the digital forensics investigator can access to this hidden document information. In legal cases, the identification of relevant digital evidence is crucial for supporting the case, verification and an examination existing legal argument forms. In this work, we show how to use the different formats and types of metadata in order to validate the legal argument for relevant evidence.