Fuzzy Trace Validation: Toward an Offline Forensic Tracking Framework

Abstract

Traditional digital forensics has been almost exclusively concerned with extracting digital traces from electronic devices to reconstruct events surrounding a particular crime. However, it might be equally important to extract complementary physical traces to learn not only about the digital activities of the suspects, but also their physical ones. In this paper, we motivate this relatively new line of research that is actually a hybrid between digital and computational forensics, we call it “offline forensic tracking” where mobility traces of an individual is reconstructed from a set of incomplete traces. We propose a reconstruction framework under various mobility models and briefly discuss how it can adopt a fuzzy Bayesian approach to reconstruct the traces. Beside reconstruction, it is also important to validate the available traces which the reconstructed ones will be based on. Therefore, as a second contribution, we show how to carry out trace validation using fuzzy logic.