Massively Threaded Digital Forensics Tools

Digital forensics comprises the set of techniques to recover, preserve, and examine digital evidence and has applications in a number of important areas, including investigation of child exploitation, identity theft, counter-terrorism, and intellectual property disputes. Digital forensics tools must exhaustively examine and interpret data at a low level, because data of evidentiary value may have been deleted, partially overwritten, obfuscated, or corrupted. While forensics investigation is typically seen as an off-line activity, improving case turnaround time is crucial, because in many cases lives or livelihoods may hang in the balance. Furthermore, if more computational resources can be brought to bear, we believe that preventative network security (which must be performed on-line) and digital forensics can be merged into a common research focus. In this chapter we consider recent hardware trends and argue that multicore CPUs and Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) offer one solution to the problem of maximizing available compute resources.