There has always been a need to validate forensic processes and tools as well as determining the trustworthiness of the digital evidence they recover and analyze. The processes and tools must present verifiable results as to how they produce evidence that is complete, authentic, and accurate, and has integrity and accuracy. While there has been a call from within the discipline emphasizing a scientific review of tools and processes, there have been complaints about the reliability of the tools. Questions have been raised as to their capability to gather data and the susceptibility of the imaged data to forgery.
Reports emerge from time to time of the apparent malfunction of some types of forensic hardware during data recovery, raising doubts as to the effectiveness of the imaging and hashing process. There have been earlier complaints from practitioners of forensic tools being incapable of...