Mobile Forensic Reference Materials: A Methodology and Reification (NIST IR 7617)

This National Institute of Standards and Technology report, NIST IR 7617, “Mobile Forensic Reference Materials: A Methodology and Reification” concerns the theoretical and practical issues with automatically populating mobile devices with reference test data for use as reference materials in validation of forensic tools. It describes an application and data set developed to populate identity modules and highlights subtleties involved in the process. Intriguing results attained by recent versions of commonly-used forensic tools when used to recover the populated data are also discussed. The results indicate that reference materials can be used to identify a variety of inaccuracies that exist in present-day forensic tools.~