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.

Forensic Tracking and Mobility Prediction in Vehicular Networks

“…The crawler traverses the various routes by repeatedly backing-up whenever it finds a plausible or implausible route. The back-up procedure proceeds as follows: when the crawler finds an (im)plausible route, it checks χ C Gp and traverses backward through the edge in χ C Gp [1] toward the vertex χ C Gp [2] where χ[n] is the n th element of the list χ. Next, it deletes the two elements from χ C Gp and repeats the entire traversal process, but this time it does not traverse the edge it just came from because it is now tagged as "visited" (or generally any edge tagged as "visited").…”

“…Investigating the locations of a suspect before, during and after a crime, may constitute key evidence, especially if it helps prove that the suspect was in a specific location at a specific time that he previously denied. This type of investigation is called "forensic tracking" [2], where the tracking is conducted for forensic purposes. Forensic tracking investigations are usually carried out in an offline manner.…”