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Cyber Forensic Labs for the Indian Police
Recently Law Enforcement offices in Chennai and Bangalore have embarked on equipping themselves with a new set of Forensic tools to tackle Cyber Crimes. This appears to be part of a new wave of modernization of the Police across India.
While, it is a welcome feature that Police are focussing on Cyber forensic empowerment for themselves, it is necessary to ensure that like many other e-Governance projects, the purchases made for building a cyber forensic lab does become merely acquisition of equipments and utilization of budgets before the year ends without building the necessary skill sets.
The present approach seen in the tender specifications of the departments is to order certain specific brand of equipments and not shop for the facilities required for the forensic process. This brand specific tendering as against process specific tendering makes the tenders lack ability to invite competitive bidding. In the process the forensic labs are simply acquiring a DRAC or a Mini Drac with Encase without looking for alternatives. If the department has already decided to buy DRAC and Encase then there is no need for a tendering process and the department can directly proceed with a negotiated buying process. It is only in the event that the departments want to buy an "Bit Imaging System" or a "Sector level analysis software" they can evaluate DRAC against ICS or Logicube or Encase against Access Data or X-Ways Forensics.
The moment the tenders become brand specific they fail to meet the standards of competitive bidding and may be open to audit objections.
In order to enable Indian law enforcement set up a functionally effective forensic lab, Naavi has put a functional lab design in place keeping the functionality. The labs may try to equip these functional units with appropriate hardware and software keeping the reliability, speed of operation and and cost considerations in view.
It may be observed that the above design provides the use of either hardware gadgets or software for acquisition. Analysis can also be done with alternate software tools. A thought has also been given on balancing of process for effective delivery of results.
However, due to the inherent systemic weakness of our traditional tendering systems, the most effective solution cannot be fit into a given requirement specification resulting in wastage of resources and inefficiency.
It is therefore suggested that the law enforcement departments try to opt of "Turnkey Installation" of Cyber Forensic labs and build specifications based on functional parameters rather than specific brands of hardware and software. The vendors may be evaluated on performance parameters at unit cost with a given reliability factor which is of acceptance to the judiciary.
Unless the departments wake up and revise their approach to acquisition of forensic equipments, they are likely to be saddled with equipments which would not be productively employed.
[For More Information on the above or for comments write to naavi@vsnl.com]
Naavi
January 28, 2007
