Towards comprehensive and collaborative forensics on email evidence

Abstract

The digital forensics community has neglected email forensics as a process, despite the fact that email remains an important tool in the commission of crime. At present, there exists little support for discovering, acquiring, and analyzing web-based email, despite its widespread use. In this paper we present a systematic process for email forensics which we integrate into the normal forensic analysis workflow, and which accommodates the distinct characteristics of email evidence. Our process focuses on detecting the presence of non-obvious artifacts related to email accounts, retrieving the data from the service provider, and representing email in a well-structured format based on existing standards. As a result, developers and organizations can collaboratively create and use analysis tools that can analyze email evidence from any source in the same fashion and the examiner can access additional data relevant to their forensic cases.