The requirements to identify the cause of an incident, following the trail of events preceding the incident, as well as proving the consistency of the potential evidence recovered from the alleged incident, ultimately demand a proactive approach towards the design of digital forensics (DF) applications. Success in the use of digital evidence for analysis or validation in digital forensic investigations depends on established processes, scientific methods, guidelines and standards that are used in the DF application designs and developments.Adding legal and scientific processes capable of absorbing the constant upgrades and updates in the design of DF applications is a boost to the already existing DF processes and standards. However, there is need for such processes to be clearly defined, so that non-technical audience involved in crime investigations and decisions, can easily comprehend the DF application designs and development processes.To proactively overcome this challenge, this paper proposes the digital forensic application requirements specifications (DFARS) process. The proposed DFARS process outlines an easy-to-apply design process for designing any DF application. It further demonstrates in a case scenario, how to apply the DFARS process using the online neighbourhood watch (ONW) system. The ONW system is a DF application that crowd-source potential digital evidence (PDE). One of the objectives of the ONW system is to increase the volume of available PDE to enhance success in prosecution of neighbourhood crime.Therefore using the DFARS process with the ONW system as a case scenario, the result shows that the DFARS process ensures an easy application of modifiability, pluggability and reliability features at any point in the life-cycle of a DF application. This thereby accommodates the constant upgrades and changes associated with electronic devices, operating systems, hardware and other requirements. It further shows an easy-to-follow process that is understandable to both technical and non-technical audiences in the field of digital forensics.
The existence of mobile devices in today's modern society has generated greater advantages to many users especially within the African continent with regard to how information is being disseminated. However, the efficacy of mobile device technology has not come without some drawbacks, especially with the proliferation of Internet enabled mobile devices among young people. Trends of cyber-bullying, for example, are on the increase and recent studies in South Africa have shown that the use of mobile devices among school pupils between the ages of 2 to 17 years is at 60%. This can only be attributed to mobile device proliferation, increased cyber technologies like social network and change of communication modes. For this reason, one might end up being excluded from this environment if one excludes oneself from the modern communication culture. However, with all this advances in mobile communication technologies, there lacks proper guidance on the side of young people with regard to the proper use of mobile devices and their forensic readiness capability. This is aggravated by the fact that a bigger percentage of parents also have no knowledge of what young people do online especially with their mobile device features such as online chat rooms, cyber-bullying, and sexting. Therefore, the problem being addressed in this paper is that: by the time of writing this paper, there exist no reliable and effective mobile forensic readiness models that can be used to create awareness to both young people and their parents on how to minimize cyber-bullying. This paper thus proposes a mobile forensic readiness model that can minimize cyber bullying, enhance awareness on issues of cyber bullying as well as the creation of parental guidance information on cyber bullying. The model can also act as a monitoring tool that can be embedded on different mobile devices assigned to, for example, learners and minors. The embedded model can then help parents and guardians to identify and maintain control of the various information and online activities that children engage in. Mobile forensic readiness model aimed at minimizing cyber bullying, as well as enhance awareness on issues of cyber bullying, constitutes the main contribution of this paper. General TermsMobile forensic readiness model, cyber bullying.
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