Hardware Forensics-an Introduction to Digital Forensics in the Embedded Computing Context

Authors: Franco DP* and Dutra LM

DOI: 10.23880/ijfsc-16000345

Volume 8, Issue 4

Abstract

The growing presence of embedded systems in the daily lives of people and companies, driven by the emergence of portable devices, makes these systems ubiquitous and a valuable source of information for criminal investigations. However, the lack of resources dedicated to forensics in this context, excluding IoT devices due to their technical particularities, led to the need to start writing this material. This article seeks to introduce experts to embedded systems forensics, highlighting the importance and existence of this field, and emphasizing that microcontrollers, flash memories, ROM memories and other often overlooked devices can contain crucial evidence for solving a variety of crimes. Furthermore, it will be discussed how to adapt conventional forensic techniques to the peculiarities of embedded systems, which generally have limited processing resources, energy constraints and high connectivity, challenging traditional forensic approaches.

Keywords: Computer Forensics; Digital Forensics; Embedded Computing; Hardware; Embedded Systems; Hardware Forensics

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