IEEE Security & Privacy Magazine Special issue on Digital Forensics

Articles due for review: 1 March 2017
Publication date: November/December 2017

OVERVIEW

Modern societies are becoming increasingly dependent on open networks where commercial activities, business transactions, and government services are delivered. Despite the benefits, these networks have led to new cyberthreats and cybersecurity issues. Abuse of and mistrust for telecommunications and computer network technologies have significant socioeconomic impacts on global enterprises as well as individuals.

Cybercriminal activities such as fraud often require the investigations that span across international borders. In addition, they’re often subject to different jurisdictions and legal systems. The increased intricacy of the communication and networking infrastructure complicates investigation of such activities. Clues of illegal digital activities are often buried in large volumes of data that makes crime detection and evidence collection difficult.

This poses new challenges for law enforcement and compels computer societies to utilize digital forensics to combat the growing number of cybercrimes. Forensic professionals must be fully prepared to gather effective digital evidence. Forensic techniques must keep pace with new technologies; therefore, digital forensics is becoming more important for law enforcement and information and network security.

This multidisciplinary area includes several fields, including law, computer science, finance, networking, data mining, and criminal justice. It faces diverse challenges and issues in terms of the efficiency of digital evidence processing and related forensic procedures.

This special issue aims to collect the most relevant ongoing research efforts in digital forensics field.

Topics include, but aren’t limited to:
- real-world case studies, best practices, and readiness;
- challenges and emerging trends;
- digital forensic triage;
- antiforensics and anti-antiforensics approaches;
- networking incident response, investigation, and evidence handling;
- network forensics and traffic analysis;
- detecting illegal sites and traffic (for instance, child abuse/exploitation);
- malware and targeted attacks including analysis and attribution;
- information-hiding techniques (network stenography, covert channels, and so on);
- stealth communication through online games and its detection;
- use and implications of machine learning in digital forensics;
- big data and digital forensics;
- network traffic fingerprinting and attacks;
- cybercrimes design, detection, and investigation;
- cybercrime issues and solutions from a digital forensics perspective;
- nontraditional forensic scenarios and approaches (for instance, vehicles, SCADA, automation and control);
- social networking forensics;
- cloud forensics;
- law enforcement and digital forensics; and
- digital forensics for incident response, research, policy compliance enforcement, and so on.

Submission Guidelines

Submissions will be subject to the IEEE Computer Society's peer-review process. Articles should be at most 6,000 words, with a maximum of 15 references, and should be understandable to a broad audience of people interested in security, privacy, and dependability. The writing style should be down to earth, practical, and original. Authors should not assume that the audience will have specialized experience in a particular subfield. All accepted articles will be edited according to the IEEE Computer Society style guide. Submit your papers to Scholar­One at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/cs-ieee.

Direct any questions and submit abstracts (by 1 Jan. 2017) to the Guest Editors:
- Wojciech Mazurczyk, Warsaw University of Technology & FernUniversität in Hagen, wmazurczyk@tele.pw.edu.pl
- Steffen Wendzel, Fraunhofer FKIE, steffen.wendzel@fkie.fraunhofer.de
- Luca Caviglione, ISSIA, National Research Council of Italy, luca.caviglione@ge.issia.cnr.it
- Simson L. Garfinkel, National Institute of Standards and Technology, simsong@acm.org