IT Forensics

Today, many criminals use computers and the Internet for their own purposes. They often leave behind digital traces that can be used to discover, investigate and prove criminal or illegal activities. The task of IT forensics is to identify, preserve and analyze these traces. However, technical developments continue to present investigators with major challenges: The mass of data has increased to such an extent that the information can only be efficiently analyzed and evaluated with the help of IT forensic tools. These tools must be further developed to keep up with the rapid pace of technological development. In addition, perpetrators use computer technology to cover their tracks and circumvent the application of IT forensic procedures and tools through the targeted use of counter-forensics techniques.

Our topics

• Trace detection on hard disks, mobile devices and other IT devices
• Development of IT forensic tools
• File Carving / Data Reconstruction
• Robust and efficient recognition of similar files
• Image classification in terms of visible content
• Manipulation detection for multimedia data
  • Detection of “Copy & Paste”, e.g. image splicing
  • Identifying AI-generated synthetic content, e.g. deepfakes
  • Metadata analysis
• Text Data Analysis
  • Computational Linguistics / NLP
  • Authorship Analysis
  • Topic Modeling
  • Sentiment Analysis
• Crawling and Open Source Intelligence OSINT
• Attacks, Security and Privacy in Machine Learning (ML)
• Fake news detection in texts and images
• Forensic financial data analysis for fraud detection

Our offer

Fraunhofer SIT is active in many areas of IT forensics and offers the following services and solutions for companies and public authorities

• Contract Research and consulting
• Publicly funded research projects, preferably in cooperation with partners from industry and public authorities
• IT forensic expert opinions as a service
• Licensing of our security solutions
• Continuing education courses