In the summer 2017, while I was teaching COMP 524 (Cybersecurity) at California State University Channel Islands, the students were introduced to a project based on an R&D from the SoCal High Technology Task Force (HTTF). The requirements and specifications asked for a device that could automate the search through vast amounts of data contained in portable devices (such as hard disks and thumb-drives), looking for pre-established patterns in file-names.
The students designed and prototyped a device the we christened SEAKER (Storage Evaluator and Knowledge Extractor Reader), based on a Raspberry Pi, with a custom designed version of Raspbian (the OS running on Raspberry Pis), and a bash shell script for cloning such devices. The first presentation of SEAKER took place on August 7, 2017, to an audience composed of CI faculty and students, as well as investigators from the SoCal HTTF.
As SEAKER was being developed, it was presented at various other venues, for example:
- On February 16, 2018, at the Camarillo Chamber of Commerce
- On April 21, 2018, at a Cybersecurity event at CSU CI
- On March 14, 2019, at the FICC conference in San Francisco, by Eric Gentry who was the leader of the student team that developed SEAKER in COMP 524 during the summer 2017.
We have also published the research resulting from the SEAKER project:
- As the masters thesis of Eric Gentry, April 2019 [pdf]
- In the proceedings of the 2019 Future of Information and Communication Conference (FICC) [doi]
- To appear in the proceedings of the 2019 23rd International Conference on Knowledge-Based and Intelligent Information & Engineering Systems (KES), track: Cybercrime Investigation and Digital Forensics