Volume 2 - Issue 4
Advanced File Carving Approaches for Multimedia Files
- Rainer Poisely
Institute of IT Security Research St. Poelten University of Applied Sciences St. Poelten, Austria
rainer.poisel@fhstp.ac.a
- Simon Tjoa
Institute of IT Security Research St. Poelten University of Applied Sciences St. Poelten, Austria
simon.tjoa@fhstp.ac.at
- Paul Tavolato
Institute of IT Security Research St. Poelten University of Applied Sciences St. Poelten, Austria
paul.tavolato@fhstp.ac.at
Keywords: Forensics, multimedia, carving, recovery, fragmented.
Abstract
File carving is a recovery technique that recovers files based on information about their structure and
content without matching file system information. As files can be recovered from their content and/or
file structure this technique is indispensable during digital forensics investigations. So far many approaches
for the recovery of digital images have been proposed. The main contribution of this paper
is a discussion of existing and new approaches for the recovery of multimedia files. After a short
discussion of relevant multimedia file formats we present an overview of the current state-of-the-art
in file carving. In the main part we focus on the implementation of a file carver for fragmented multimedia
files. Finally, we summarize our findings and give an outlook with regard to post-processing
files that have been recovered successfully.