Digital Forensics Dispatch

NIST Releases Report on Scientific Foundations of Digital Forensics

May 12, 2022

Recently the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released a draft report titled Digital Investigation Techniques: A NIST Scientific Foundation Review. NIST is a non-regulatory agency of the US Department of Commerce that is tasked with promoting innovation in the industrial competitiveness of the US by studying, documenting and furthering technology.

The draft report was created to document techniques used to examine digital evidence from electronic devices, study the scientific foundations of the methods, and identify areas where there might be knowledge gaps or areas improvements could be made.

After establishing the background of how computer systems actually store and organize different types of data the report lays out sources of digital forensic information, and covers scientific foundations of different digital forensic tasks. The draft concludes in part that “Digital investigation techniques are based on established computer science methods and are reliable when used with knowledge of how a tool functions and its limitations.”

We would encourage anyone in the digital forensic community, or any interested party for that matter, to take a look at the report themselves. It is still in draft form and open for public comment until July 11 2022.

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