Towards an Authoritative Framework for Digital Forensics: Evidence Validation for Court Proceedings

This paper explores the current landscape of Digital Forensics (DF) frameworks, focusing on their role in validating evidence in criminal court proceedings. Despite the range of frameworks encompassing both individual and all stages of the investigative process, there remains a need for an authoritative framework specifically for Courts to validate evidence acquired by Digital Forensics Practitioners (DFPs). This paper adopts an exploratory approach, aiming to identify trends, address gaps, and discover opportunities within existing frameworks to build a new, superimposed framework for evidence validation. By analyzing high-level techniques outlined in existing frameworks, this paper will lay the foundation for the development of an authoritative framework that aids DFPs as they work through the investigative process, thereby increasing the integrity of digital evidence presented in court.