Digital Corpora: Producing the Digital Body

Simson L Garfinkel
George Mason University & US Census Bureau

Track 2

This talk is about the Digital Corpora website, which is a collection of open source data designed for testing digital forensics tools and assisting in digital forensics education. The Digital Corpora website has files, disk images, network captures, memory, and complete scenarios. Some of the scenarios have teacher’s packets and solutions which are distributed in encrypted form; the solution key is only available to faculty at accredited universities, US Government organizations, law enforcement, and some foreign partners. This talk presents the range of materials on the Digital Corpora website, presents quantitate impact measures on both education and research, and explains how to create useful test data for digital forensics research and education.

About Simson L Garfinkel

Simson Garfinkel is the Senior Computer Scientist for Confidentiality and Data Access at the US Census Bureau. He holds seven US patents and has published more than 50 research articles in computer security and digital forensics. He is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and a member of the National Association of Science Writers. His most recent book is The Computer Book, which features 250 chronologically arranged milestones in the history of computing. As a journalist, he has written about science, technology, and technology policy in the popular press since 1983, and has won several national journalism awards.

Garfinkel received three Bachelor of Science degrees from MIT in 1987, a Master's of Science in Journalism from Columbia University in 1988, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT in 2005.