Digital forensics of Microsoft Office 2007–2013 documents to prevent covert communication

MS Office suit software is the most widely used electronic documents by a large number of users in the world, which has absolute predominance in office software market. MS Office 2007-2013 documents, which use new office open extensible markup language (OOXML) format, could be illegally used as cover mediums to transmit secret information by offenders, because they do not easily arouse others suspicion. This paper proposes nine forensic methods and an integrated forensic tool for OOXML format documents on the basis of researching the potential information hiding methods. The proposed forensic methods and tool cover three categories; document structure, document content, and document format. The aim is to prevent covert communication and provide security detection technology for electronic documents downloaded by users. The proposed methods can prevent the damage of secret information embedded by offenders. Extensive experiments based on real data set demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.