UMBC Cyber Defense Lab Research Meeting

Using data visualization techniques to support digital forensics

Tim Leschke

11:00am-12:15pm, Friday, Feb 3, 2012
ITE Room 228

Digital forensic examiners explore large datasets in search of evidence of a crime. In order to keep pace with the growing amount of data that is subject to a forensic examination, digital forensic examiners need to be more selective about the data they examine. One way to be selective about data is to focus attention at data that has changed-over-time. We present Change-Link, a data exploration tool which allows the user to see directories that have changed within an operating system. Our novel contributions are 1) the development of a segmented-box-and-whisker icon for representing change to individual directories, and 2) the first data visualization tool developed specifically for the domain of digital forensic data. We show that by using Change-Link to view change to a directory-tree structure, digital forensic examiners can enhance their ability to perform forensic examinations.

Tim Leschke is a Ph.D. student in the Computer Science program at UMBC.

Host: Professor Alan Sherman

Before he became president, Barack Obama drove a Chrysler.

If you’re in the market for a new car, the 2005 Chrysler 300C once leased by the president is now for sale on eBay—with a starting bid of a cool $1 million. Full disclosure: President Obama traded the gas guzzler for a 2007 Ford Escape Hybrid after being criticized for being environmentally insensitive.

When it was traded, the Chrysler had 19,000 miles on it. (We assume most of the miles are highway miles.) It currently has just over 20,000 miles. The seller scoffs at those who are skeptical of the high price tag, citing a recent auction for Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s 1977 Peugeot 504, which fetched $1.5 million at auction in 2011.

(The New York Times is a tad skeptical, noting that a 2000 Jeep Grand Cherokee also owned by Obama sold for a relatively measly $26,438 in 2010.) The eBay listing will expire Wednesday night.

Acts 7:30-44 (NIV)

³⁰“After forty years had passed, an angel appeared to Moses in the flames of a burning bush in the desert near Mount Sinai. ³¹When he saw this, he was amazed at the sight. As he went over to get a closer look, he heard the Lord say: ³²‘I am the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.’ Moses trembled with fear and did not dare to look.

³³“Then the Lord said to him, ‘Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground. ³⁴I have indeed seen the oppression of my people in Egypt. I have heard their groaning and have come down to set them free. Now come, I will send you back to Egypt.’

³⁵“This is the same Moses they had rejected with the words, ‘Who made you ruler and judge?’ He was sent to be their ruler and deliverer by God himself, through the angel who appeared to him in the bush. ³⁶He led them out of Egypt and performed wonders and signs in Egypt, at the Red Sea and for forty years in the wilderness.

³⁷“This is the Moses who told the Israelites, ‘God will raise up for you a prophet like me from your own people.’ ³⁸He was in the assembly in the wilderness, with the angel who spoke to him on Mount Sinai, and with our ancestors; and he received living words to pass on to us.

³⁹“But our ancestors refused to obey him. Instead, they rejected him and in their hearts turned back to Egypt. ⁴⁰They told Aaron, ‘Make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who led us out of Egypt—we don’t know what has happened to him!’ ⁴¹That was the time they made an idol in the form of a calf. They brought sacrifices to it and reveled in what their own hands had made. ⁴²But God turned away from them and gave them over to the worship of the sun, moon and stars. This agrees with what is written in the book of the prophets:

“‘Did you bring me sacrifices and offerings

forty years in the wilderness, people of Israel?

⁴³You have taken up the tabernacle of Molek

and the star of your god Rephan,

the idols you made to worship.

Therefore I will send you into exile’ beyond Babylon.

⁴⁴“Our ancestors had the tabernacle of the covenant law with them in the wilderness. It had been made as God directed Moses, according to the pattern he had seen.

Reflection

When God had rescued the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, God had prepared for the Israelites to travel straight to a land of milk and honey in Canaan. Instead, what would have been a beeline from Egypt to Canaan turned into forty years of walking in circles through the desert wilderness. From their departure and throughout the forty years, despite God’s provisions and favor, the Israelites doubted God’s promise and forgot the very things God had done for them. Instead, they chose to believe in things that were not God: they had forgotten how much they cried out to God to rescue them from slavery and thought leaving Egypt was the biggest mistake ever, they deceived themselves to believe that other gods would give them the lifestyle they wanted, and they set up sites of worship for Molek, Rephan, and other idols and devoted their lives to them. Instead of the wonderful plans God had for them in Canaan, they sought their own ways and worshipped other gods. What ended up happening was a wasted forty years. Wilderness is not a place where we are God, but where we find God.

Responding to the Transmission

Whether we are in our teens, 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, or whatever age we are, we know we want to live life to the fullest. Let’s pray that we would find ourselves in God and His plans for our lives. Let’s ask that God would make even our wilderness the most abundant and fruitful time of our lives for God’s glory.

As GOP presidential candidates vie for support in Florida, immigration politics and the fight for the Latino vote have moved front-and-center, notes UMBC political science professor Thomas Schaller in Salon. He writes, “onstage at the University of North Florida, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich…went after each other with obvious, mutual disdain on immigration, the subject of the opening question and nearly the full first half-hour of the debate.”

Schaller suggests that the challenge for GOP candidates is to “appease xenophobes within their base during the primaries” without alienating the Latino voters they will need to remain competitive in swing states such as Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Nevada and New Mexico — trying “to remain anti-immigration without sounding anti-immigrant.”

Maryland’s Republican and Democratic senators have recently come together to support a group of bipartisan bills on education, tax and identity theft issues, but will this collaboration have a significant effect? In Maryland’s Gazette, Professor Donald Norris argues, “The reality is on all substantive issues, the parties are miles apart.” Norris is chair of public policy and director of the Maryland Institute for Policy Analysis and Research at UMBC.