Digital Evidence.

The article focuses on the relevance of digital evidence. Those concerned with privacy issues and identity theft are familiar with the concept of dumpster diving. Trash often reveals the dealings of an individual or a corporation. The risks of revealing private information through the trash has led to a boom in the sale of paper shredders. To ensure reliable data storage, the tracks on hard-drive platters are wider than the influence of the heads, with a gap between tracks. Thus, even after wiper software has been applied, there may still be ghosts of the original data, just partially obscured. Thus a tradeoff between the cost to the user and the cost to the investigator is observed. Forensics investigators take care to examine disks in a manner that does not tamper with the evidence. Another approach is to consider file recovery as a fait accompli and ensure the recovered data is not available as evidence. Encryption clearly has a role to play here. An encrypting file system built into the operating system can be helpful, but may provide only a false sense of security-unless one has adequate assurance of its cryptanalytic strength.