Tracks Inspector: Putting Digital Investigations in the Hands of Investigators

With the pervasiveness of computers and mobile devices, digital forensics becomes more important in law enforcement. Investigators increasingly depend on the scarce support of digital specialists which impedes efficiency of criminal investigations. This paper describes the architecture of Tracks Inspector, a commercially available product for computer assisted discovery of digital evidence. Tracks Inspector was designed to put digital investigation in the hands of non-technical investigators. The design criteria aim to look for "low hanging fruit" in the evidence without the help of digital forensic experts. As a result we expect that backlogs will be reduced and investigators can better explain to the experts what they are looking for. Experts can then focus on the challenging work. The architecture of Tracks Inspector is scalable, robust, secure and supports cases with hundreds of evidence units giving access to hundreds of users through a simple web-based user interface.