Article
DFPulse: The 2024 digital forensic practitioner survey
Contribution Summary
This paper reports on the DFPulse survey, the largest digital forensic practitioner survey to date, conducted in 2024. The survey collected data from 122 practitioners worldwide, providing insights into their operating environments, technologies used, challenges faced, and future research directions. The study aims to improve collaboration between academia and practitioners, addressing the gap between research and practice in digital forensics. The survey's results highlight the importance of understanding the needs and objectives of practitioners to ensure that researchers are tackling the right problems. The study provides a comprehensive analysis of the survey results, including quantitative and qualitative data, and discusses the implications for academia, the improvements that can be made, and future research directions. The paper also presents a dataset containing the responses to the survey, allowing researchers and the academic community to further analyze and inform their future research directions.
Keywords: Digital forensics; Practitioner survey; Collaboration between academia and practitioners; Research-practice gap; Digital forensic research directions; Academic collaboration; Practitioner engagement with academic output; Future research directions
Abstract
This paper reports on the largest survey of digital forensic practitioners to date (DFPulse) conducted from March to May 2024 resulting in 122 responses. The survey collected information about practitioners' operating environments, the technologies they encounter, investigative techniques they use, the challenges they face, the degree to which academic research is accessed and useful to the practitioner community, and their suggested future research directions. The paper includes quantitative and qualitative results from the survey and a discussion of the implications for academia, the improvements that can be made, and future research directions.
BibTeX
@article{HARGREAVES2024DFPulse,
title = {DFPulse: The 2024 digital forensic practitioner survey},
journal = {Forensic Science International: Digital Investigation},
volume = {51},
pages = {301844},
year = {2024},
issn = {2666-2817},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fsidi.2024.301844},
url = {https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666281724001719},
author = {Christopher Hargreaves and Frank Breitinger and Liz Dowthwaite and Helena Webb and Mark Scanlon},
keywords = {Digital forensics, Practitioner survey, Challenges, Future directions, Artificial intelligence},
abstract = {This paper reports on the largest survey of digital forensic practitioners to date (DFPulse) conducted from March to May 2024 resulting in 122 responses. The survey collected information about practitioners' operating environments, the technologies they encounter, investigative techniques they use, the challenges they face, the degree to which academic research is accessed and useful to the practitioner community, and their suggested future research directions. The paper includes quantitative and qualitative results from the survey and a discussion of the implications for academia, the improvements that can be made, and future research directions.}
}