Thank you – Jan Pluskal and Ondřej Ryšavý – for having me on the research project: Netfox detective: A novel open-source network forensics analysis tool. The Article will be available for free download until Nov 6th, 2020 through this link.
Abstract
Network forensics is a major sub-discipline of digital forensics which becomes more and more important in an age where everything is connected. In order to cope with the amounts of data and other challenges within networks, practitioners require powerful tools that support them. In this paper, we highlight a novel open-source network forensic tool named – Netfox Detective – that outperforms existing tools such as Wireshark or NetworkMiner in certain areas. For instance, it provides a heuristically based engine for traffic processing that can be easily extended. Using robust parsers (we are not solely relying on the RFC description but use heuristics), our application tolerates malformed or missing conversation segments. Besides outlining the tool's architecture and basic processing concepts, we also explain how it can be extended. Lastly, a comparison with other similar tools is presented as well as a real-world scenario is discussed.