Cyber Forensics in Kerala?

Computers and mobile devices have created a niche for themselves in the digital communication stratosphere. With the advance of technology, the power of these devices has increased leaps and bounds. Due to this growing popularity, computers and mobile devices have plunged into criminal activities also. Drug dealers, rapists and murderers across the State have been caught based on the electronic devices they carry around. Cyber Forensics deals with the application of investigation and analysis techniques to gather and preserve evidence from a computing device in a method accepted by the court of law. Mobile Device forensics is an evolving form of cyber forensics. New models of mobile phones are released every few months and thus its usage has also increased tremendously ? both for good and bad purposes. This scenario poses new challenges for forensic examiners because acquiring tamper-free data from a mobile device is of great importance in crime investigations. Such data resides at different locations in a mobile device such as handset memory, attached memory cards, call records, SMS, calendar entries, installed applications etc. This paper deals with the study of forensic tools used for investigation of cyber crime in Kerala. The paper discusses the capabilities and shortcomings of the forensic tools under study. An enhancement is proposed for the currently available tools, to make them a comprehensive set of tools with a set of features that combats a wide range of cyber and mobile device crimes.