Engineering an online computer forensic service

XIRAF is a second-generation forensic analysis system developed at the Netherlands Forensic Institute. XIRAF automates the collection of millions of forensic artefacts and organizes these artefacts such that they can be searched in effective ways through a web interface. This paper describes the design of version 1.2 of XIRAF and describes the lessons we learned from implementing and deploying it. Today, a number of Dutch law enforcement organizations are using the XIRAF service offered by the Netherlands Forensic Institute. Our experience with this service indicates that XIRAF allows investigative teams of dozens of investigators with varying technical background to collaborate effectively and allows them to obtain results from amounts of digital evidence that were infeasible to handle in a cost-effective way before. (c) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.