Research Interests

Overview of My Research Area

My area of research focus in computer engineering lie in the surface of network forensics,cloud forensics and Internet of Things(IoT) forensics. All of these areas come under broad title computer forensic or digital forensics. The main objective of my core researches in this field focus in tracing malicious users and regenerating their communicated contents of network session when some network traffic anomalies have been reported pertaining to computing environments. All my research works conduct network forensic investigation on a particular network session based on nature of service and protocols equipped for communication over internet. 16-1

Digital forensics is a science concerned with the recovery and investigation of material found in digital artifacts, often as part of a criminal investigation. Digital artifacts can include computer systems, storage devices, electronic documents, or even sequences of data packets transmitted across a computer network. Network forensics is a branch of digital forensics that focuses on the monitoring and analysis of network traffic. Unlike other areas of digital forensics that focus on stored or static data, network forensics deals with volatile and dynamic data. It generally has two uses. The first, relating to security, involves detecting anomalous traffic and identifying intrusions. The second use, relating to law enforcement, involves capturing and analyzing network traffic and can include tasks such as reassembling transferred files, searching for keywords, and parsing human communication such as emails or chat sessions.

All my research work aims to introduce an integrated forensic technique to be used for inspecting, reordering and reconstructing the contents of packets in a network session for forensic investigation of protocols for Email, Webmail, Chat and Instant Messaging, Video upload and download stream using HTTP, HTTPS/SSL based communication followed by its decryption, Upload and download sessions using encrypted and unencrypted file transfer protocols, Skype Conversation and VoIP environments. Each of these researches covers detailed study and analysis of concerned protocols structure and its communication schemes in regard with forensic analysis. The significance of my research contributions significantly help network forensic or crime investigators and administrators to analyse the network activities offline or online when some malicious user activity is reported or suspected. All the forensic information about the network stream will be processed to ensure and locate the culprits involved in any malicious activities. These strategic approach not only collects and organizes the forensic details, but also process the actual digital evidences such as files, videos, voice data and other voice conversations from the targeted communication environments. These forensic approaches will also generate the forensic report which involves forensic details like, IP address of user, port numbers, username of the user, time of network activity with procured digital evidences. At this stage, the suspected user or users undergo investigation by the cyber crime police to evaluate the forensic report. Once cyber crime police confirm malicious activity and culprits, they will be prosecuted by local judiciary system as per the IT laws in a specific country. Thus my research includes but limited to following areas.

  • Information Security
  • Cyber Security
  • Network Security
  • Computer Networks.
  • Distributed Computing
  • Network Forensics
  • Digital Forensic Sciences
  • Cloud Computing and Forensics
  • Internet of Things and Forensics
  • Fog Computing
  • Web Engineering