The Daubert standard is a set of criteria that governs the admissibility of expert witnesses' testimony and scientific evidence during federal legal proceedings in the United States. The Frye Standard holds that expert testimony must be based on scientific methods that are sufficiently established and accepted. Here we answer how Adroit Photo Forensics meets the Daubert and Frye standards to the best of our knowledge.
Yes. Adroit Photo Forensics has been used by FBI agents, police departments, public defenders, and law enforcement and intelligence agencies on real disk evidence outside laboratory environment. Adroit recovers more evidence than other tools and each result can be reproduced independently by concatenating the blocks in the order Adroit reports. Our customers include local, federal, and international law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Finally, our SmartCarving technology has been incorporated into the Department of Defence's internal tools.
Yes. Adroit's SmartCarving™ and GuidedCarving™ techniques which were developed at the Information Systems and Internet Security lab at Polytechnic Institute of NYU have been published in many peer-reviewed conferences and journals. SmartCarving™ used by Adroit Photo Forensics has won the best paper award at Digital Forensics Research Workshop, the premiere conference in digital forensics. Here is a list of all relevant publications and the corresponding conferences and journals.
Error rate is low enough to be close to zero. When combining disk blocks to form a JPEG photo Adroit Photo Forensics validates each resulting photo to ensure blocks are put together properly and in the correct order. Valid and invalid photos are put into two separate groups. Each recovered photo and its corresponding block numbers are also included in the report Adroit generates. Results can also be validated independent of Adroit by concatenating the blocks in the order Adroit reports and viewing the results in a photo viewer. You can also export results from Adroit Photo Forensics into AccessData's FTK to further verify the accuracy of recovery.
It should be noted that validation also applies to the deleted photos that Adroit recovers through sequential data carving. Unlike other forensic products doing data carving, by decoding and validating each photo, Adroit is able to clearly identify which photos are incomplete/corrupt and which ones are complete. In essence, this means that our deleted photo recovery standards currently exceed that used by other forensic products. To take an example, look at the photos recovered by Adroit (right) and another leading forensic tool (left) below from the open test set DFRWS 2006.
We encourage users to test Adroit Photo Forensics along with other
digital forensics products on open data sets, such as:
— DFRWS 2007 and DFRWS 2006 data sets
— Digital Corpora data sets
There are no explicit standards for the processing of digital evidence.
Adroit follows same design principles as other digital forensics tools
and ensures evidence integrity is preserved by:
— not modifying the digital evidence during processing by Adroit.
— generating hashes, such as MD5 and SHA256, on the disk evidence and on every recovered photo.
— logging of user activity.
Adroit can be used with existing standards, legal processes, or
best practices to maintain integrity of evidence, preserve chain of custody, etc.
Yes. Sequential carving is currently used by all digital forensics tools. SmartCarving™ and GuidedCarving™ are unique to Adroit Photo Forensics and very similar in principle. Furthermore, Adroit reports enough information about recovered evidence to repeat the process and recover the same photo. (See above for peer-reviewed publications.)