Cyber-Hardware Forensics & Assurance Evaluation R&D Programme

Computer and network technology has become indispensable tools in current day and without a doubt, in future as well. Co-evolving with the technology will be crimes, such as fraud, disclosure and infringement; and hence it is important to have high level of technical knowledge and rigorous procedures to investigate such trespasses. Research into digital forensics will be important as a new way of obtaining evidence and means of criminal investigation. At the same time, it is important to evaluate whether the latest hardware devices are secured from malicious attacks to provide assurance for their usage in critical systems.

The Cyber-Hardware Forensics & Assurance Evaluation R&D Programme (CHFA) is funded by National Cyber Research & Development Programme (NCR) under National Research Foundation Singapore. Starting from May 2019 and ending in April 2024, this programme aims to explore and research on new methods in digital forensics to enable both investigative and counteractive abilities.

The techniques to be explored in this programme will be anchored at the hardware level, rather than pure software, as product hardware has a much longer lifetime, spanning several years. The goal of this programme would be to translate the research output into both techniques and technology and should contribute to investigative capabilities, as well as for industrial R&D.

In Thrusts (i) and (ii), the main activities are to conduct research to forensically analyse and recover data from physically damaged or criminally damaged hardware in a time-efficient manner. 

In Thrusts (iii) and (iv), the main activities are towards developing methods to evaluate modern processors for security and privacy where the research in these thrusts will produce advanced hardware evaluation techniques to evaluate hardware for assurance.