The 6th Annual DFRWS was held from August 14 to 16, 2006 in Lafayette, Indiana and featured presentations and discussions on new strategies to meet the accelerating challenges of digital forensics around the world.  There were 18 peer reviewed papers and a keynote by Ted Lindsey, FBI on “Current Cyber Investigation Challenges in Digital Forensics”

Day 1 featured a panel on “Issues in Building the Digital Forensics Bridge From Computer Science to Judicial Science” with Michael Losavio, Deborah Wilson, Adel Elmaghraby, James Graham, S. Srinivasan, David Elder, and Marcus Rogers.

The Best Paper Award went to “Searching for Processes and Threads in Microsoft Windows Memory Dumps” by Andreas Schuster, Deutsche Telekom AG, Germany.

The Forensics Challenge was on Data Carving — the process of extracting a collection of data from a larger data set. Data carving techniques frequently occur during a digital investigation when the unallocated file system space is analyzed to extract files. The files are “carved” from the unallocated space using file type-specific header and footer values. File system structures are not used during the process.  The results of existing file carving tools typically contain many false positives. An investigator must test each of the extracted files by opening them in an application that supports the file type. The goal of the DFRWS 2006 Forensics Challenge was to design and develop file carving algorithms that identify more files and reduce the number of false positives.

The 2006 Forensics Challenge Winners were Klayton Monroe, Andy Bair & Jay Smith.