Search Results (29)

According to the latest Verizon DBIR report, credential abuse, including password reuse and human factors in password creation, remains the leading attack vector. It was revealed that most users change their passwords only when they forget them, and 35% of respondents find mandatory password rotation policies inconvenient. These findings highlight the importance of combining technical solutions with user-focused education to strengthen password security. In this research, the “human factor in the creation of usernames and passwords” is considered a vulnerability, as identifying the patterns or rules used by users in password generation can significantly reduce the number of possible combinations that attackers need to try in order to gain access to personal data. The proposed method based on an LSTM model operates at a character level, detecting recurrent structures and generating generalized masks that reflect the most common components in password creation. Open datasets of 31,000 compromised passwords from real-world leaks were used to train the model and it achieved over 90% test accuracy without signs of overfitting. A new method of evaluating the individual password creation habits of users and automatically fetching context-rich keywords from a user’s public web and social media footprint via a keyword-extraction algorithm is developed, and this approach is incorporated into a web application that allows clients to locally fine-tune an LSTM model locally, run it through ONNX, and carry out all inference on-device, ensuring complete data confidentiality and adherence to privacy regulations. Full article

Deepfake technology poses significant threats in various domains, including politics, cybersecurity, and social media. This study uses the golden frame selection technique to present a neural network ensemble method for deepfake classification. The proposed approach optimizes computational resources by extracting the most informative video frames, improving detection accuracy. We integrate multiple deep learning models, including ResNet50, EfficientNetB0, Xception, InceptionV3, and Facenet, with an XGBoost meta-model for enhanced classification performance. Experimental results demonstrate a 91% accuracy rate, outperforming traditional deepfake detection models. Additionally, feature importance analysis using Grad-CAM highlights how different architectures focus on distinct facial regions, enhancing overall model interpretability. The findings contribute to of robust and efficient deepfake detection techniques, with potential applications in digital forensics, media verification, and cybersecurity. Full article

This research focuses on the detection of deepfake images and videos for forensic analysis using deep learning techniques. It highlights the importance of preserving privacy and authenticity in digital media. The background of the study emphasizes the growing threat of deepfakes, which pose significant challenges in various domains, including social media, politics, and entertainment. Current methodologies primarily rely on visual features that are specific to the dataset and fail to generalize well across varying manipulation techniques. However, these techniques focus on either spatial or temporal features individually and lack robustness in handling complex deepfake artifacts that involve fused facial regions such as eyes, nose, and mouth. Key approaches include the use of CNNs, RNNs, and hybrid models like CNN-LSTM, CNN-GRU, and temporal convolutional networks (TCNs) to capture both spatial and temporal features during the detection of deepfake videos and images. The research incorporates data augmentation with GANs to enhance model performance and proposes an innovative fusion of artifact inspection and facial landmark detection for improved accuracy. The experimental results show near-perfect detection accuracy across diverse datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness of these models. However, challenges remain, such as the difficulty of detecting deepfakes in compressed video formats, the need for handling noise and addressing dataset imbalances. The research presents an enhanced hybrid model that improves detection accuracy while maintaining performance across various datasets. Future work includes improving model generalization to detect emerging deepfake techniques better. The experimental results reveal a near-perfect accuracy of over 99% across different architectures, highlighting their effectiveness in forensic investigations. Full article

With the rise of social media platforms and the vast amount of text content generated on these platforms, text data forensics has emerged as a new area of research that aims to verify posts’ authenticity by analyzing textual content. This study proposes an innovative hybrid framework for detecting fake content on social media by examining both the text and metadata of Twitter posts. The metadata are fed into a feature selection method to select the most beneficial features. Using multiple inputs, a hybrid deep learning framework is proposed to classify Twitter posts as real or fake, where fake content is defined as posts containing misleading information. This research significantly contributes to the field of text data forensics by enhancing the detection of such fake texts. A recent comprehensive dataset for text data forensics called CIC Truth Seeker Dataset 2023 was used to assess the effectiveness of the proposed framework; the proposed framework uses long short-term memory (LSTM) to process textual data and hybrid residual neural network (ResNet) and deep neural network (DNN) layers for metadata. The framework has shown promising results during its preliminary evaluations. The paper examines the proposed model’s architecture and performance while highlighting potential improvements in privacy, ethics, real-time deployment, and implementation limitations to emphasize its broader impact. Full article

The rise of AI-generated synthetic media, or deepfakes, has introduced unprecedented opportunities and challenges across various fields, including entertainment, cybersecurity, and digital communication. Using advanced frameworks such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Diffusion Models (DMs), deepfakes are capable of producing highly realistic yet fabricated content, while these advancements enable creative and innovative applications, they also pose severe ethical, social, and security risks due to their potential misuse. The proliferation of deepfakes has triggered phenomena like “Impostor Bias”, a growing skepticism toward the authenticity of multimedia content, further complicating trust in digital interactions. This paper is mainly based on the description of a research project called FF4ALL (FF4ALL-Detection of Deep Fake Media and Life-Long Media Authentication) for the detection and authentication of deepfakes, focusing on areas such as forensic attribution, passive and active authentication, and detection in real-world scenarios. By exploring both the strengths and limitations of current methodologies, we highlight critical research gaps and propose directions for future advancements to ensure media integrity and trustworthiness in an era increasingly dominated by synthetic media. Full article

The rapid evolution of computer technology and social networks has led to massive data generation through interpersonal communications, necessitating improved methods for information mining and relational analysis in areas such as criminal activity. This paper introduces a Social Network Forensic Analysis model that employs network representation learning to identify and analyze key figures within criminal networks, including leadership structures. The model incorporates traditional web forensics and community algorithms, utilizing concepts such as centrality and similarity measures and integrating the Deepwalk, Line, and Node2vec algorithms to map criminal networks into vector spaces. This maintains node features and structural information that are crucial for the relational analysis. The model refines node relationships through modified random walk sampling, using BFS and DFS, and employs a Continuous Bag-of-Words with Hierarchical Softmax for node vectorization, optimizing the value distribution via the Huffman tree. Hierarchical clustering and distance measures (cosine and Euclidean) were used to identify the key nodes and establish a hierarchy of influence. The findings demonstrate the effectiveness of the model in accurately vectorizing nodes, enhancing inter-node relationship precision, and optimizing clustering, thereby advancing the tools for combating complex criminal networks. Full article

In this systematic literature review, we delve into the realm of intention recognition within the context of digital forensics and cybercrime. The rise of cybercrime has become a major concern for individuals, organizations, and governments worldwide. Digital forensics is a field that deals with the investigation and analysis of digital evidence in order to identify, preserve, and analyze information that can be used as evidence in a court of law. Intention recognition is a subfield of artificial intelligence that deals with the identification of agents’ intentions based on their actions and change of states. In the context of cybercrime, intention recognition can be used to identify the intentions of cybercriminals and even to predict their future actions. Employing a PRISMA systematic review approach, we curated research articles from reputable journals and categorized them into three distinct modeling approaches: logic-based, classical machine learning-based, and deep learning-based. Notably, intention recognition has transcended its historical confinement to network security, now addressing critical challenges across various subdomains, including social engineering attacks, artificial intelligence black box vulnerabilities, and physical security. While deep learning emerges as the dominant paradigm, its inherent lack of transparency poses a challenge in the digital forensics landscape. However, it is imperative that models developed for digital forensics possess intrinsic attributes of explainability and logical coherence, thereby fostering judicial confidence, mitigating biases, and upholding accountability for their determinations. To this end, we advocate for hybrid solutions that blend explainability, reasonableness, efficiency, and accuracy. Furthermore, we propose the creation of a taxonomy to precisely define intention recognition, paving the way for future advancements in this pivotal field. Full article

Social media platforms have completely revolutionized human communication and social interactions. Their positive impacts are simply undeniable. What has also become undeniable is the prevalence of harmful antisocial behaviors on these platforms. Cyberbullying, misinformation, hate speech, radicalization, and extremist propaganda have caused significant harms to society and its most vulnerable populations. Thus, the social media forensics field was born to enable investigators and law enforcement agents to better investigate and prosecute these cybercrimes. This paper surveys the latest research works in the field to explore how artificial intelligence (AI) techniques are being utilized in social media forensics investigations. We examine how natural language processing can be used to identify extremist ideologies, detect online bullying, and analyze deceptive profiles. Additionally, we explore the literature on GNNs and how they are applied in social network modeling for forensic purposes. We conclude by discussing the key challenges in the field and suggest future research directions. Full article

Social media applications have been ubiquitous in modern society, and their usage has grown exponentially over the years. With the widespread adoption of these platforms, social media has evolved into a significant origin of digital evidence in the domain of digital forensics. The increasing utilization of social media has caused an increase in the number of studies focusing on artifact (digital remnants of data) recovery from these platforms. As a result, we aim to present a comprehensive survey of the existing literature from the past 15 years on artifact recovery from social media applications in digital forensics. We analyze various approaches and techniques employed for artifact recovery, structuring our review on well-defined analysis focus categories, which are memory, disk, and network. By scrutinizing the available literature, we determine the trends and commonalities in existing research and further identify gaps in existing literature and areas of opportunity for future research in this field. The survey is expected to provide a valuable resource for academicians, digital forensics professionals, and researchers by enhancing their comprehension of the current state of the art in artifact recovery from social media applications. Additionally, it highlights the need for continued research to keep up with social media’s constantly evolving nature and its consequent impact on digital forensics. Full article

The electric network frequency (ENF) is a signal that varies over time and represents the frequency of the energy supplied by a mains power system. It continually varies around a nominal value of 50/60 Hz as a result of fluctuations over time in the supply and demand of power and has been employed for various forensic applications. Based on these ENF fluctuations, the intensity of illumination of a light source powered by the electrical grid similarly fluctuates. Videos recorded under such light sources may capture the ENF and hence can be analyzed to extract the ENF. Cameras using the rolling shutter sampling mechanism acquire each row of a video frame sequentially at a time, referred to as the read-out time ($T_{ro}$) which is a camera-specific parameter. This parameter can be exploited for camera forensic applications. In this paper, we present an approach that exploits the ENF and the $T_{ro}$ to identify the source camera of an ENF-containing video of unknown source. The suggested approach considers a practical scenario where a video obtained from the public, including social media, is investigated by law enforcement to ascertain if it originated from a suspect’s camera. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Full article

Recently, digital images have been considered the primary key for many applications, such as forensics, medical diagnosis, and social networks. Image forgery detection is considered one of the most complex digital image applications. More profoundly, image splicing was investigated as one of the common types of image forgery. As a result, we proposed a convolutional neural network (CNN) model for detecting splicing forged images in real-time and with high accuracy, with a small number of parameters as compared with the recently published approaches. The presented model is a lightweight model with only four convolutional layers and four max-pooling layers, which is suitable for most environments that have limitations in their resources. A detailed comparison was conducted between the proposed model and the other investigated models. The sensitivity and specificity of the proposed model over CASIA 1.0, CASIA 2.0, and CUISDE datasets are determined. The proposed model achieved an accuracy of 99.1% in detecting forgery on the CASIA 1.0 dataset, 99.3% in detecting forgery on the CASIA 2.0 dataset, and 100% in detecting forgery on the CUISDE dataset. The proposed model achieved high accuracy, with a small number of parameters. Therefore, specialists can use the proposed approach as an automated tool for real-time forged image detection. Full article

Author identification is an important aspect of literary analysis, studied in natural language processing (NLP). It aids identify the most probable author of articles, news texts or social media comments and tweets, for example. It can be applied to other domains such as criminal and civil cases, cybersecurity, forensics, identification of plagiarizer, and many more. An automated system in this context can thus be very beneficial for society. In this paper, we propose a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based author identification system from literary articles. This system uses visual features along with a five-layer convolutional neural network for the identification of authors. The prime motivation behind this approach was the feasibility to identify distinct writing styles through a visualization of the writing patterns. Experiments were performed on 1200 articles from 50 authors achieving a maximum accuracy of 93.58%. Furthermore, to see how the system performed on different volumes of data, the experiments were performed on partitions of the dataset. The system outperformed standard handcrafted feature-based techniques as well as established works on publicly available datasets. Full article

TikTok has consistently been one of the most used mobile apps worldwide on any mobile operating system. However, despite people’s enjoyment of using the application, there have been growing concerns about the application’s origins and alleged privacy violations. These allegations have become such a big problem that the former President of the United States, Donald Trump, expressed a desire to ban the TikTok application from being offered on US application stores like Google’s Play Store and Apple’s App Store. This remark sent TikTok users into a frenzy to find alternatives before the ban took effect. To this end, several alternative applications for TikTok have surfaced and are already garnering millions of users. In this paper, we identified three popular alternatives to the TikTok application (Byte, Dubmash, and Triller) and forensically analyzed each on smartphones of Android version 8 and iOS version 13. We focused on identifying forensically relevant artifacts that may be helpful to investigators in the event of a criminal investigation, should these or similar apps fall under scrutiny. We used Magnet AXIOM Process and Cellebrite UFED 4PC for acquisition, and Magnet AXIOM Examine and DB Browser for SQLite for analysis and reading. The investigation resulted in successful extraction of expected yet unique data points, plain text sensitive data, directories and format. These results lead to a discussion about identifying and comparing these app’s privacy concerns to that of TikTok, as formulated from the literature. Full article

Social media usage is increasing at a rapid rate. Everyday users are leaving a substantial amount of data as artifacts in these applications. As the size and velocity of data increase, innovative technologies such as Web Storage and IndexedDB are emerging. Consequently, forensic investigators are facing challenges to adapt to the emerging technologies to establish reliable techniques for extracting and analyzing suspect information. This paper investigates the convenience and efficacy of performing forensic investigations with a time frame and social network connection analysis on IndexedDB technology. It focuses on artifacts from prevalently used social networking site Instagram on the Mozilla Firefox browser. A single case pretest–posttest quasi-experiment is designed and executed over Instagram web application to produce artifacts that are later extracted, processed, characterized, and presented in forms of information suited to forensic investigation. The artifacts obtained from Mozilla Firefox are crossed-checked with artifacts of Google Chrome for verification. In the end, the efficacy of using these artifacts in forensic investigations is shown with a demonstration through a proof-of-concept tool. The results indicate that Instagram artifacts stored in IndexedDB technology can be utilized efficiently for forensic investigations, with a large variety of information ranging from fully constructed user data to time and location indicators. Full article

Social media evidence is the new topic in digital forensics. If social media information is correctly explored, there will be significant support for investigating various offenses. Exploring social media information to give the government potential proof of a crime is not an easy task. Digital forensic investigation is based on natural language processing (NLP) techniques and the blockchain framework proposed in this process. The main reason for using NLP in this process is for data collection analysis, representations of every phase, vectorization phase, feature selection, and classifier evaluation. Applying a blockchain technique in this system secures the data information to avoid hacking and any network attack. The system’s potential is demonstrated by using a real-world dataset. Full article