Biblio

Operating systems have various components that produce artifacts. These artifacts are the outcome of a user’s interaction with an application or program and the operating system’s logging capabilities. Thus, these artifacts have great importance in digital forensics investigations. For example, these artifacts can be utilized in a court of law to prove the existence of compromising computer system behaviors. One such component of the Microsoft Windows operating system is Shellbag, which is an enticing source of digital evidence of high forensics interest. The presence of a Shellbag entry means a specific user has visited a particular folder and done some customizations such as accessing, sorting, resizing the window, etc. In this work, we forensically analyze Shellbag as we talk about its purpose, types, and specificity with the latest version of the Windows 11 operating system and uncover the registry hives that contain Shellbag customization information. We also conduct in-depth forensics examinations on Shellbag entries using three tools of three different types, i.e., open-source, freeware, and proprietary tools. Lastly, we compared the capabilities of tools utilized in Shellbag forensics investigations.

The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is a complex and dynamic mobile network system that enables information sharing between vehicles, their surrounding sensors, and clouds. While IoV opens new opportunities in various applications and services to provide safety on the road, it introduces new challenges in the field of digital forensics investigations. The existing tools and procedures of digital forensics cannot meet the highly distributed, decentralized, dynamic, and mobile infrastructures of the IoV. Forensic investigators will face challenges while identifying necessary pieces of evidence from the IoV environment, and collecting and analyzing the evidence. In this article, we propose TrustIoV - a digital forensic framework for the IoV systems that provides mechanisms to collect and store trustworthy evidence from the distributed infrastructure. Trust-IoV maintains a secure provenance of the evidence to ensure the integrity of the stored evidence and allows investigators to verify the integrity of the evidence during an investigation. Our experimental results on a simulated environment suggest that Trust-IoV can operate with minimal overhead while ensuring the trustworthiness of evidence in a strong adversarial scenario.