|
The U.S. Air Force was awarded a patent (US10853177B2) in December 2020, for an innovative process to rapidly and accurately salvage renderable content from digital data sources that outperforms previously existing solutions.
This technological innovation was created by the DoD Cyber Crime Center’s (DC3) Technical Solutions Development line of effort and is now available in executable form as DC3 Advanced Carver.
The resulting unique capabilities empowers digital forensic examiners to salvage content that other tools are not capable of recovering. It was created by the R&D team led by Joan Donohue, director, TSD; with initial funding from a competitive award process.
“I am proud of the innovative work that went into the development of DC3 Advanced Carver,” said Donohue. “The team was composed of exceptionally talented developers.”
Of more than 120 projects, the Office of the Secretary of Defense singled out Advanced Carver in briefs to U.S. House of Representatives and Senate appropriators, highlighting the “game changing capabilities” generated from the project.
DC3 Advanced Carver can recover complete files and repair fragments for multiple file formats to increase the amount of salvaged content that can be viewed. This tool will work with any data that it is given, including unallocated space on device images, memory dumps, page files and corrupt files.
Targeted file formats include images, videos, documents, databases and executables. Advanced Carver contains a number of unique algorithms for identifying, repairing, and reconstructing file fragments that would be unreadable on their own. Advanced Carver has a modular design that makes it easy to enable/disable individual content types and for drop-in extensions to target any additional content types not supported out of the box.
At the heart of Advanced Carver and its development is the inventor, Dr. Eoghan Casey, chief scientist, DC3.
“DC3 Advanced Carver was created to maximize renderable recovered content by salvaging files and fragments that other tools miss; it eliminates false positive results typically produced by other carving tools,” said Casey. “The innovative design enables Advanced Carver to recover files faster by leveraging all available resources of a computer.”
The idea of obtaining a patent for Advanced Carver began in 2016, with discussions between Casey and Richard Giroux, attorney advisor, DC3. Giroux conducted preliminary research regarding patent eligibility for Advanced Carver and had discussions with counsel at Air Force Materiel Command, which led to making a request to the Department of the Air Force to invest the resources to pursue the patent.
The provisional patent application was collaboratively drafted by Casey and Giroux, and then submitted to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) in April 2017. The Department of the Air Force then contracted with outside counsel to prosecute the patent with the USPTO, which involved continued discussion and engagement by Casey, resulting with the patent being awarded nearly three years later.
Giroux explained, “separately, DC3 has pursued and obtained delegated authority to license its intellectual property, including the Advanced Carver patent, for use outside of the federal government. The award of the patent significantly enhances DC3’s reputation as a research facility in the area of digital and multimedia forensics and also allows DC3 to manage further development of this patented file salvaging capability.”
Advanced Carver has proven to be a unique and reliable tool for digital forensic practitioners working on a variety of investigations. In a recent case, video extraction from a digital video recorder was required; however, the video had a proprietary wrapper.
“A special software player was required to view the date/timestamps of the video,” said an unidentified digital forensic examiner in a customer survey. “Examiners were only able to identify 10 videos for the relevant time frame utilizing existing tools. Utilizing Advanced Carver and collaborating with a developer subject matter expert on how date/time stamps were stored in video files; 1,874 video clips of the relevant time frame were recovered."
Another unidentified digital forensic examiner shared this in a survey.
"In a case with a single cellphone as evidence, an examiner ran a UFED Physical Analyzer on its most thorough setting and recovered a total of 103,160 pictures. Advanced Carver was able to recover 270,228 photographs. Many of the missing photographs were case relevant."
DC3’s TSD maintains, develops and supports a large variety of tools and enterprise solutions for DC3 mission areas, DC3 customers and other partnering agencies.
“The awarding of the Advanced Carver Patent is an astounding accomplishment and reflects the innovation and ingenuity of our developers and mission directorates,” said Jeffrey Specht, Executive Director, DC3. “The continuous innovation of our TSD directorate has not only expanded the capabilities of DC3 as a mission support agency, but has significantly increased the competencies of our ultimate customers – the digital forensic examiners and analysts in the field.”
DC3 AC is available for download from the DC3 Customer Portal at https://customerportal.dc3.mil/
Learn more about TSD at https://www.dc3.mil/Organizations/Technical-Solutions/Technical-Solutions-Development-TSD/
|
