Digital Assembly's Blog

Photo Forensics: Advanced File Carving Techniques Files on disks...

Wed, 26 May 2010 17:08:45 -0400

Photo Forensics: Advanced File Carving Techniques

Files on disks and memory cards are broken into small blocks prior to storage. SmartCarving, described in this talk, looks at a deleted file as a giant jigsaw puzzle where each block of the file is a piece of the puzzle. Recovering a deleted file is like solving a jigsaw puzzle with tens of thousands of pieces. Recovering all the deleted files from a disk or memory card is equivalent to solving multiple jigsaw puzzles with hundreds of millions of pieces simultaneously!

Image Forensics: Collection, search, authentication, &...

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 12:22:12 -0400

Image Forensics: Collection, search, authentication, & attribution by Nasir Memon

Recent Developments in Image Forensics

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 16:17:00 -0400

Professor Nasir Memon will be presenting at the HTCIA Northeast Chapter Conference on May 18—20, 2010.

Abstract: Recent Developments in Image Forensics

Given images and video can you tell which camera it was taken from? Can you tell if it was manipulated? Given a camera or even a picture, can you find from the Internet all other pictures taken from the same camera? Forensics professionals all over the world are increasingly encountering such questions. This talk will address such questions and describe latest research in image forensic techniques aimed at addressing them.

Given the ease by which digital images can be created, altered, and manipulated with no obvious traces, digital image forensics has emerged as a research field with important implications for ensuring digital image credibility. This talk will provide an overview of recent developments in the field, focusing on three problems. First, collecting image evidence and reconstructing them from fragments, with or without missing pieces. This involves sophisticated file carving technology. Second, attributing the image to a source, be it a camera, a scanner, or a graphically generated picture. The process entails associating the image with a class of sources with common characteristics (device model) or matching the image to an individual source device, for example a specific camera. Third, attesting to the integrity of image data. This involves image forgery detection to determine whether an image has undergone modification or processing after being initially captured.

Talk: File carving for forensics recovery

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 15:21:00 -0500

If you are in New York City (tri-state) area please consider attending the following talk.

The Center for Cybercrime Studies John Jay College of Criminal Justice PresentsFile Carving for Forensics Recovery

Speaker: Nasir Memon, Professor of Computer Science, Director of the Information Systems and Internet Security (ISIS) Lab, Polytechnic Institute of New York University & Co-founder of Digital Assembly.

Abstract: As the number of digital devices in use continues to increase, there has also been an increase in the seizure and analysis of digital data for forensic purposes. One of the areas of high forensic interest is in the recovery of digital data from devices. In cases where the file system information for a digital device is missing or corrupt, newer data recovery techniques involving a process known as file carving are used to recover the data. This talk describes the need for and evolution of file carving, and presents the various technologies that have been used to improve file carving recovery, including our own Smart Carving techniques.

Date: Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Time: Reception – 1:45pm, Lecture – 2:00 pm
Location: Room 630T, Haaren Hall 899 Tenth Avenue, New York City 10019

(Harren Hall is on 10th Avenue, between 58th and 59th Streets)

RSVP: Nicole Daniels at 212-237-8920 or email ndaniels@jjay.cuny.edu.

For additional information please contact Professor Doug Salane, Director of the Center for Cybercrime Studies, at 212-237-8836 or email dsalane@jjay.cuny.edu

Keep your photos safe this season

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 14:21:00 -0500

We take billions of photos everyday. We will take more photos this Holiday season than any previous season. Facebook users, for example, have taken more than 10 billion photos so far and continue to upload 2 billion photos every month! We also lose a lot of photos to deletions, formats, to media corruption, and device failures. About 200,000 people look for a way to recover deleted photos on Google every month. We are happy to have helped a lot of them recover their precious photos.

You should know that even if you lose photos you can recover them. Deleted, corrupted photos can certainly be recovered. Photo recovery software like Adroit Photo Recovery can help you restore those photos. However, it is always safer to not have to worry about photo recovery, and one of the ways you can protect your photos is by following this little known tip:

Tip: Delete less frequently in big batches.

Delete photos less frequently from your camera. Postpone your delete until you have a large number of photos that need deletion.

Follow this simple mantra when you take photos and you will not only be able to prevent accidental deletions or corruptions but also be able to recover more photos in case of accidents.

For the most of us, taking a photo is usually a four-step process:

Compose a scene
Capture a photo
Examine the photo
Keep it or delete it

Postponing the last step of deleting a photo until the memory card is full (or nearly full) can help prevent accidents. Frequent deletion of photos creates two problems:

It increases the chances of accidentally deleting or corrupting a photo or triggering a device failure.
It creates many small free slots (or “holes”) in the memory cards making it difficult to recover deleted photos.

The advantages of deleting photos en masse is that there are fewer chances of accidents (because you will not delete often) and the holes created by deletion are likely to be larger making the likelihood of photo recovery higher.

Hello World!

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 23:29:00 -0500

Hello! Thanks for visiting our blog. We will begin regular posting on this blog soon. We intend to cover a broad range of topics; everything from how to recover photos from a wet camera to using sequential hypothesis to recover photos with missing fragments! Keep an eye on this space. Again, thanks for visiting. We hope you will drop by again.