Fooling the bad guys

Everything that you do with your mobile phone or digital camera or on a personal computer generates a digital time stamp that records when the action took place. Criminal computer hackers have learned how to forge this time stamp, which otherwise could be valuable for criminal investigators.

Now it’s harder for bad guys to cover their tracks. One of Norwegian National Authority for Investigation and Prosecution of Economic and Environmental Crime’s own investigators, Stein Yngvar Willassen, has a PhD from NTNU. While at the university, he developed a software tool that can check and compare all of a machine’s time stamps with each other.

It is actually very difficult to falsify all of a system’s time stamps without causing differences or other evidence of tampering. The technique looks as if will be very useful in digital forensics.