Development of a Prototype Program for Separating Overlapping Images Files

The digital world where internet is easily accessible to everyone, cybercrime in cyberspace is on the rise. If the perpetrator has knowledge of cryptography, investigating and solving such crimes becomes extremely challenging. The objective of this research is to study and develop a prototype program for separating overlapping image files which is one of the methods of steganography. Python is the primary programming language used for development, along with file carving technique using file signature to separate overlapping files. In addition, the program creates hash files using MD5 and SHA-1 to ensure the evidence is not tampered with and can be presented in court. The program generates reports summarizing the results of image file separation, both in text and Excel formats. The effectiveness of the program was tested on 678 overlapping image files and the result showed that it took only 13.907 seconds to separate the files, which is significantly faster than manual separation of the same number of files. The researcher hopes that this research will help reduce the time and errors caused by human intervention in file carving for forensic investigations.