Future digital forensics in an advanced trusted environment

Automation in digital forensics has been subject to intensive research in various disciplines. One of the main challenges in the field is finding an efficient automated procedure to properly collect persuasive evidence and to archive it in a secure manner. In this paper we discuss this challenge from a technical perspective. We introduce the concept of a Future Advanced Trusted Environment framework and discuss the kind of incidents this framework can identify autonomously and those for which human intelligence is still required. Based on this framework we introduce the Trusted Forensic Module, a new hardware security extension to standard computer systems. We explain this new module in detail and show its advanced concept.