Digital Forensics Classification Based on a Hybrid Neural Network and the Salp Swarm Algorithm

In recent times, cybercrime has increased significantly and dramatically. This made the need for Digital Forensics (DF) urgent. The main objective of DF is to keep proof in its original state by identifying, collecting, analyzing, and evaluating digital data to rebuild past acts. The proof of cybercrime can be found inside a computer's system files. This paper investigates the viability of Multilayer perceptron (MLP) in DF application. The proposed method relies on analyzing the file system in a computer to determine if it is tampered by a specific computer program. A dataset describes a set of features of file system activities in a given period. These data are used to train the MLP and build a training model for classification purposes. Identifying the optimal set of MLP parameters (weights and biases) is a challenging matter in training MLPs. Using traditional training algorithms causes stagnation in local minima and slow convergence. This paper proposes a Salp Swarm Algorithm (SSA) as a trainer for MLP using an optimized set of MLP parameters. SSA has proved its applicability in different applications and obtained promising optimization results. This motivated us to apply SSA in the context of DF to train MLP as it was never used for this purpose before. The results are validated by comparisons with other meta-heuristic algorithms. The SSAMLP-DF is the best algorithm because it achieves the highest accuracy results, minimum error rate, and best convergence scale.