Hansken's contribution to transforming Digital Forensics
How do law enforcement agencies keep up with the challenge of analyzing big data in case investigations? That was one of the important issues during the EAFS in Stockholm in June 2022, where the European community of forensics sciences with visitors from all continents gathered to learn about new developments. During an extensive and diverse program, Hansken presented its role in the transformation of Digital Forensics from multiple angles.
Transformation in Digital Forensics: an active role for the case investigator
In the management track, Hans Henseler, Senior Advisor Digital Forensics at the NFI and lector Digital Forensics & E-Discovery at the University of applied Sciences in Leiden, highlighted the importance of looking at digital forensics in a progressive way. It is about a transformation in thinking and doing, and Hansken offers the tools and facilities to support the law enforcement parties in this process.
This fact was subsequently fleshed out in the workshop 'Challenges in digital forensics, mobile, AI and IoT'. Here, Hans Henseler paid attention to the challenge of how to get digital evidence on the desk of the case investigator and let him/her work constructively with the data. In this context, the new Hansken user interface 'HUIB' was introduced. This is a user interface that is developed to make the digital case data intuitively accessible to case investigators (and not primarily the digital experts). We are currently working on the availability of HUIB a standard in the Hansken software.
Workshop 'Hands-on with Hansken'
The well-attended Hansken workshop focussed on an active introduction to Hansken. Harm van Beek, Senior Digital Forensic Scientist at the Netherlands Forensic Institute, Hans Henseler and Jennifer Kuiper, Learning Specialist at Hansken, showed what case investigations look like in Hansken. They illustrated this with an appealing challenge, developed within the Hansken Academy. Attendees of the EAFS also had an opportunity to join in a meeting together with Dell Technologies, to experience the installation of Hansken on premise, and discuss hyper converged infrastructure HCI solutions.
Hansken Academic Version
In addition to using Hansken as an application, the development of knowledge within the Hansken Community is also an important asset. In order to be able to use the vision of the academic world, the platform facilitates a Hansken Academic Version in which the academia can follow all developments and contribute innovative ideas and plug-ins. This version was brought to the attention during the European Day, presented by Hans Henseler.
Working on enriching the Hansken Community
To continue the transformation in Digital Forensics, an optimal cooperation between law enforcement parties is of great relevance. During the EAFS in Stockholm we saw great examples of the involvement of different Hansken partners and ambassadors. For example, Martijn Egberts from the Netherlands Public Prosecution Service spoke during the Hansken workshop about the function in Hansken that gives defense lawyers access to their data sets. Prosecution will benefit from this development as well, because the defense lawyer is able to analyze material much faster and see if there is evidence which they want to bring forward in court. This functionality is currently being worked on.
There were references to Hansken by Eoghan Casey, professor of Digital Forensic Science and Investigation at the University of Lausanne, in his keynote on crowd sourcing in digital forensics, and from Katrin Franke, professor in computer science within the information security environment at NTNU, talking about the reliability of AI in forensic sciences. Also Hannu Eronen, who is AI Program Lead at the National Bureau of Investigation in Finland, shared some lessons learned from their ongoing Hansken pilot. And last but not least, Hansken developments were shared with all ENFSI-members during the ENFSI working group.
Hansken Newsletter
So, a lot went on in Stockholm… And this is only a summary of Hansken’s presence at the EAFS! If you would like to keep up with all of Hansken's activities, don't hesitate to subscribe to the Hansken Newsletter. Periodically, we share new experiences, developments and events.
