You must have surely enjoyed those television dramas in which forensic sleuths get to the root of a crime by using mobile phone data. However, were you interested in knowing what technology was used to get to the bottom of this? Perhaps not and this may be due to the fact that it wasn’t your job anyway.

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a new method to improve the validation of a crime lab’s mobile phone forensics tools, and early results have been encouraging so far.

The SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) in your mobile phone accommodates various types of data such as phonebook entries, recently dialed numbers, text messages and cellular carrier information. When a crime occurs, forensic examiners use off-the-shelf software tools to extract the data, which helps them to “connect the dots” for identifying affiliations or detecting mobile phone activity around the time of that event.

The software tools employed by forensic teams should be validated to determine suitability for use before such information is presented as valid evidence in court or other formal proceedings. Currently, preparing test materials for assessing mobile phone tools consist of learning new command languages, and this involves a lot of hard work.

The NIST team has also developed an experimental application, SIMfill, and a preliminary test dataset. SIMfill can automatically upload mobile phone data such as phone numbers and text messages to “populate” test SIMs that can then be recovered by forensic mobile phone tools. In this way, SIMfill can be used to evaluate the quality of off-the-shelf tools.

Co-author of the study, Wayne Jansen, said they documented the results of a recent experiment with commonly used mobile phone forensics tools. According to him, their study was a proof of concept. This is what he said, “No tool was found to work perfectly and some worked poorly on fairly simple test cases.” Jansen was optimistic that forensic examiners will use their study to validate mobile forensics tools completely before they put them to use.

If this seems to be of your interest, you can download the SIMfill software and dataset for free at http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/SNS/mobile_security/mobile_forensics_software.html

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