The Enhancement of Graduate Digital Forensics Education via the DC3 Digital Forensics Challenge

This paper describes supplementing the digital forensics course at the Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT) with the highly-successful DoD Cyber Crime Center (DC3) Digital Forensics Challenge. The DC3 Digital Forensics Challenge consists of several difficult digital forensic tasks. The knowledge and skills required to complete these tasks often resides outside of the material presented in a graduate digital forensics course. By utilizing concepts taught in AFIT's digital forensics course, a team of four graduate students won the 2007 competition. In this paper, we explain how our team used forensically sound principles learned in class, reinforcing the class concepts, coupled with old-fashioned hard work to successfully complete the challenge.