Due to its critical role in cybersecurity, digital forensics has received significant attention from researchers and practitioners alike. The ever increasing sophistication of modern cyberattacks is directly related to the complexity of evidence acquisition, which often requires the use of several technologies. To date, researchers have presented many surveys and reviews on the field. However, such articles focused on the advances of each particular domain of digital forensics individually. Therefore, while each of these surveys facilitates researchers and practitioners to keep up with the latest advances in a particular domain of digital forensics, the global perspective is missing. Aiming to fill this gap, we performed a qualitative review of all the relevant reviews in the field of digital forensics, determined the main topics on digital forensics topics and identified their main challenges. Despite the diversity of topics and methods, there are several common problems that are faced by almost all of them, with most of them residing in evidence acquisition and pre-processing due to counter analysis methods and difficulties of collecting data from devices, the cloud etc. Beyond pure technical issues, our study highlights procedural issues in terms of readiness, reporting and presentation, as well as ethics, highlighting the European perspective which is traditionally stricter in terms of privacy. Our extensive analysis paves the way for closer collaboration among researcher and practitioners among different topics of digital forensics.

Smart-home installations exponential growth has raised major security concerns. To this direction, the GHOST project, a European Union Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation funded project, aims to develop a reference architecture for securing smart-homes IoT ecosystem. It is required to have automated and user friendly security mechanisms embedded into smart-home environments, to protect the users’ digital well being. GHOST project aims to fulfill this requirement and one of its main functionalities is the traffic monitoring for all IoT related network protocols. In this paper, the traffic capturing and monitoring mechanism of the GHOST system, called NDFA, is presented, as the first mechanism that is able to monitor smart-home activity in a holistic way. With the help of the NDFA, we compile the GHOST-IoT-data-set, an IoT network traffic data-set, captured in a real world smart-home installation. This data-set contains traffic from multiple network interfaces with both normal real life activity and simulated abnormal functioning of the devices. The GHOST-IoT-data-set is offered to the research community as a proof of concept to demonstrate the ability of the NDFA module to process the raw network traffic from a real world smart-home installation with multiple network interfaces and IoT devices.

The H2020 European research project GHOST — Safe-Guarding Home IoT Environments with Personalised Real-time Risk Control — aims to deploy a highly effective security framework for IoT smart home residents through a novel reference architecture for user-centric cyber security in smart homes providing an unobtrusive and user-comprehensible solution. The aforementioned security framework leads to a transparent cyber security environment by increasing the effectiveness of the existing cyber security services and enhancing system's self-defence through disruptive software-enabled network security solutions. In this paper, GHOST security framework for IoT-based smart homes is presented. It is aiming to address the security challenges posed by several types of attacks, such as network, device and software. The effective design of the overall multi-layered architecture is analysed, with particular emphasis given to the integration aspects through dynamic and re-configurable solutions and the features provided by each one of the architectural layers. Additionally, real-life trials and the associated use cases are described showcasing the competences and potential of the proposed framework.