ABSTRACT
This chapter looks some of the opportunities and challenges for the policing of digital crime in the future. The challenges and opportunities often reside in the same phenomenon, for example cloud computing offers the opportunity for distributed approaches for dealing with large amounts of data from mobile phones but also provides challenges in terms of the recovery of evidence. Many aspects of the digital forensic investigation of PCs can also be automated using commercial tools such as X-ways' WinHex, Guidance Software's Encase, and Access Data's FTK. Ideally such tools should be forensically sound the Computer Forensic Tool Testing (CFTT) project at the United States National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) carries out tests on forensic tools using a standardised methodology. Increasingly though, PCs are being fitted with solid-state drives (SSDs) instead of, or in addition to hard disk drive (HDDs). The SSDs have a number of advantages over HDDs: they are smaller, quicker, more energy efficient and more robust.
