Bloom Filters

In our feature article, Richard Carbone who works for Defence R&D Canada, introduces the application of Bloom Filters into Digital Forensics as a method of identifying hard to detect data from partial evidentiary hashes. You may have heard of Bloom Filters, but did you know that modified versions of them could be used for disk forensics? Although straightforward to use, understanding them will require briefly looking at the mathematics behind them. In this article, we will look at the theory behind Bloom filters and how we might use them for disk based digital forensics. We will be following up this article with a second part that will demonstrate several real-world example applications of modified Bloom filter-based forensics.