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Prior Publisher

The Association of Digital Forensics, Security and Law (ADFSL)

Abstract

Forensic readiness of business information systems can support future forensics investigation or auditing on external/internal attacks, internal sabotage and espionage, and business fraud. To establish forensics readiness, it is essential for an organization to identify which fingerprints are relevant and where they can be located, to determine whether they are logged in a forensically sound way and whether all the needed fingerprints are available to reconstruct the events successfully. Also, a fingerprint identification and locating mechanism should be provided to guide potential forensics investigation in the future. Furthermore, mechanisms should be established to automate the security incident tracking and reconstruction processes. In this research, external and internal attacks are first modeled as augmented attack trees based on the vulnerabilities of business information systems. Then, modeled attacks are conducted against a honeynet that simulates an online business information system, and a forensic investigation follows each attack. Finally, an evidence tree, which is expected to provide the necessary contextual information to automate the attack tracking and reconstruction process in the future, is built for each attack based on fingerprints identified and located within the system.

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