Digital forensics and investigations meet artificial intelligence

In the frame of Digital Forensic (DF) and Digital Investigations (DI), the “Evidence Analysis” phase has the aim to provide objective data, and to perform suitable elaboration of these data so as to help in the formation of possible hypotheses, which could later be presented as elements of proof in court. The aim of our research is to explore the applicability of Artificial Intelligence (AI) along with computational logic tools – and in particular the Answer Set Programming (ASP) approach — to the automation of evidence analysis. We will show how significant complex investigations, hardly solvable for human experts, can be expressed as optimization problems belonging in many cases to the ℙ or ℕℙ complexity classes. All these problems can be expressed in ASP. As a proof of concept, in this paper we present the formalization of realistic investigative cases via simple ASP programs, and show how such a methodology can lead to the formulation of tangible investigative hypotheses. We also sketch a design for a feasible Decision Support System (DSS) especially meant for investigators, based on artificial intelligence tools.