Towards an Integrated Digital Forensic Investigation Framework for an IoT-Based Ecosystem

Internet of Things (IoT) is a relatively new wave of technology that is increasingly becoming popular in many different organisations globally. In essence, IoT is synonymous to networking technology, which allows individuals to connect to different devices in order to facilitate easy sharing of resources as well as communication. However, the one major difference between computer networking technology and IoT is the heterogeneity of data involved and distributed nature of IoT that involves self-actuating devices. Furthermore, the heterogeneity and distributed nature of IoT further brings complexity of the IoT ecosystem. For this reason, IoT ecosystem presents a big challenge to both Digital Forensic (DE) investigators and Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) when trying to implement DF techniques. What makes digital forensic investigations even harder in IoT ecosystem is its vastness and the rapidity with which it is expanding globally. This paper, thus, proposes an Integrated Digital Forensic Investigation Framework (IDEIF-IoT) for an IoT ecosystem which is an extension of an initially proposed generic Digital Forensic Investigation Framework for Internet of Things (DEIF-IoT). Note that, the main emphasis in this paper is on proposing an integrated framework with acceptable digital forensic techniques that are able to analyse Potential Digital Evidence (PDE) from the IoT-based ecosystem that may be used to prove a fact.