A Comprehensive Survey on Computer Forensics: State-of-the-Art, Tools, Techniques, Challenges, and Future Directions

With the alarmingly increasing rate of cybercrimes worldwide, there is a dire need to combat cybercrimes timely and effectively. Cyberattacks on computing machines leave certain artifacts on target device storage that can reveal the identity and behavior of cyber-criminals if processed and analyzed intelligently. Forensic agencies and law enforcement departments use several digital forensic toolkits, both commercial and open-source, to examine digital evidence. The proposed research survey focuses on identifying the current state-of-the-art digital forensics concepts in existing research, sheds light on research gaps, presents a detailed introduction of different computer forensic domains and forensic toolkits used for computer forensics in the current era. The proposed survey also presents a comparative analysis based on the tool's characteristics to facilitate investigators in tool selection during the forensics process. Finally, the proposed survey identifies and derives current challenges and future research directions in computer forensics.