Digital Forensics for Digital Archivists

I’ve been very fortunate here at UVa to have at my disposal some wonderful resources for getting up to speed with born-digital theory and practice. First and foremost, UVa is home to Rare Book School which has offered a course on Born Digital Materials for the past two years (and I’ve just learned will offer it again in 2012). I was able to take this course in July along with 11 fellow classmates from around the country. A week and a half later I was then off to the headquarters of Digital Intelligence, Inc. makers of our Forensic Recovery of Evidence Device (FRED) for Computer Forensics with FRED. This was a two day course covering basic digital forensic skills as well as the FRED system.

Mulder and Scully are concerned about the viability of this forensic evidence gathered next to UVa's FRED...

Given my great bounty, and my belief in professional karma, I’ve decided to give a brief overview of both of these classes here on the blog followed by my thoughts on a potential Digital Forensics for Archivists class/workshop that I’d really like to see developed, by myself or whomever! Two major classes out there that I have not taken are the DigCCurr Professional Institute and SAA’s electronic records workshop. Anyone with experiences in those classes, please add your comparisons in the comments.

RBS L95 — Born Digital Materials: Theory and Practice

Overall, I’d say this class has the perfect name: there’s an almost equal amount of theory and practice. That may sound like faint praise, but it’s really not. It’s something that too few workshops or classes get right. Instructors Naomi Nelson and Matt Kirschenbaum deserve much credit for a well constructed week that built practice on top of theory.

For someone new to the field of the born-digital it’s a great foundation. Concepts like metadata, preservation, “the cloud,” essential characteristics, physicality/materiality and digital humanities are combined with real-life examples from libraries, archives, and the university. This overview allowed us to attack the fundamental question of the class: what should we be trying to accomplish when we attempt to “save” (or steward, curate, safeguard, preserve, “archive”) born-digital materials.

On the practical side of things, digital forensics is covered and students get the opportunity to do a few lab exercises with emulators, floppy drives, and older models of equipment. The syllabus and reading list provide an excellent bibliography for further research.

It’s a relatively high-level class and therefore a great way to get started or a great way to get administrators thinking intelligently about the issues they need to face. I think that a more practitioner-focused and through digital forensics curriculum in the archives or cultural heritage setting could complement the course very nicely.

Computer Forensics with FRED training

University of Virginia decided to invest in the FRED technology last year and has not regretted it. While the FRED can do lots of neat things, I feel it is important to note that many or all of the same things can be done with other hardware and software, it just takes a bit more persistence. Similarly, despite the name a lot of this course dealt with basic data and file system concepts, as well as a little bit about some of the specific hardware most commonly found. In the future, DI is going to be splitting this up into two classes: Digital Forensic Essentials and Digital Forensics with FRED. The first part is a two day course and covers the hardware, data, and system stuff. The second is a one day class that covers the specifics of FRED. Although the first class will be more expensive than the current combined class is, it would be of more interest to those in the archival world.

As it is geared for law enforcement, a lot of time was spent on detected deleted, fraudulent, or hidden material. While all the cops in the room thought that this would be of no use to me, I disagreed. I need to know what I am collecting (whether inadvertent or not), whether it is authentic, and how to communicate with donors to decide how to deal with it. In addition, if we can get donors to agree to let us transfer backup or deleted versions of manuscripts, we’ll gain a wealth of information about how the final version evolved. Knowing that such recovery is possible is one of the more glamorous promises of digital forensics.

We also learned how to create and navigate disk images. While some of this stuff was fairly easy for me to pick up beforehand from Peter Chan’s tutorials, the extra practice and insight was very useful.

Digital Forensics for Archivists

Based on my experiences in these two classes, I would propose a Digital Forensics for Archivists workshop geared specifically for those interested in incorporating forensic techniques into the capture and processing of digital materials. The outline of topics I would expect to see on the syllabus below is probably a bit ambitious for a one-day workshop and would certainly have some hurdles to overcome related to provisioning hardware for all. However, these are the areas I’ve come to think of as necessary for an archive to be prepared for the variety of media that we will be collecting for the continuing future.

Digital Forensics for Archivists

• Hardware basics


• IDE, SCSI, SATA, USB, Firewire
• Floppy drives
• Optical disks
• Hard drives
• Internal basics (motherboard, pci, power, etc.)


• Operating Systems


• DOS
• Windows
• MAC OS
• Linux


• File system basics


• FAT


• NTFS


• HPFS


• Forensic vs. logical copying


• What happens to deleted data


• How it can be recovered


• Why you need to know…


• Write blocking


• How to achieve it


• Image files


• Types


• Software


• Uses


• Emulation and Migration


• Cost/benefit of each


• Possible use cases for each

So what do you think? Pipe dream? Useful? Impractical? Let me know in the comments…

Forensic workstation pt 1

A key part of dealing with born-digital archives is the ability to receive and process material without making changes to the underlying metadata including date created, date accessed etc – data that researchers will be looking to use and rely on. As archivists we place considerable emphasis on our roles as custodians and with digital material it is important that we treat the material carefully and appropriately. Fortunately there are tools that help us with the authenticity of born-digital files the most obvious of which is the checksum.

An important legacy of the AIMS project for us at Hull is working towards our ability to take born-digital material from depositors as a normal part of our work. A key component of this is a forensic workstation – by which I mean a PC (or two) through which material can be safely captured following a clear process, in-effect replicating the isolation room for receiving paper material. This will allow us to undertake a forensic examination – to check the material is what we expected or agreed to take, including the ability to generate a manifest of the material to send to the depositor, and that it does not include viruses etc.

There seem to be two main routes – to purchase FRED which stands for Forensic Recovery Evidence Device (other digital forensic workstation solutions are available). A second and more organic solution, and the one we intend to adopt at Hull, is to start with a new PC and to add appropriate hardware and software to this to provide the equivalent functionality. At the moment we are pondering a name for this with current suggestions including:
- Hal - Hull Archives Laboratory
- Harold – Hull Archives Recovery Of Legacy Data
- Hilary - Hull Investigator for Library and Archives RecoverY
- Dawn – Digital Archives WorkstatioN
but we are open to other suggestions until the machine is installed and formally named!

We don’t want to become a computer museum with an extensive range of hardware, software and operating systems environments for any possible eventuality. We do want a core ability to handle material we reasonable expect to receive – including material on 3.5” floppy disks, zip disks, hard drives etc. We intend to develop and extend our capacity as need dictates – if we get material in a format we will consider whether we need to support this ourselves or whether a suitable 3rd party is more appropriate.

Central to this is the need for write blockers which prevent you from writing or updating the files. Having read countless websites I felt I knew what they were supposed to do but had a nagging doubt that my knowledge was incomplete.

A tour of the British Library eMss Labs courtesy of Jeremy Leighton John (as featured on the BBC Radio 4 programme 'Tales from the Digital Archives' broadcast in May but still available online) confirmed the simplicity of theory and the fragility of the media – just having the hardware isn’t enough – you also need some luck that you have the correct drivers to read the specific version of the media. In the next few weeks I hope to place our order for the various bits and pieces and will update you on this exciting journey!!