A Study on the Usability of Text Analysis on Web Artifacts for Digital Forensic Investigation

Digital forensic investigation is not new in the field of forensic science which faced several challenges over the past decades. Due to the complexity of performing investigative inquiry on a large amount of data on digital evidence, the choice of appropriate forensic tools, skills, and expertise poses issues and challenges in digital forensic investigation. In this study, an effective approach to performing investigative inquiry based on web browser artifacts was pursued by utilizing text analysis to identify the user's characteristics. Information extraction was performed from a publicly available dataset by extracting, analyzing web browser artifacts, and performing in-house data labeling. Data labeling of the processed web artifacts was conducted and evaluated by an expert volunteer for investigative purposes to achieve the goal of persona characteristic identification of a computer user. Thus, helping investigators interpret textual-based evidence fast even though with a notable amount of data being analyzed versus when human-based analysis is manually performed in the pursuit of solving crimes committed using the internet.