Digital Assembly, NYU-Poly Help Speed Forensic Digital Photo Recovery for Government and Law Enforcement Agencies
Digital Assembly, a leading photo forensics software company with roots at Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU-Poly), will collaborate with the U.S. Department of Defense Cyber Crime Center (DC3) to improve DC3’s internally developed forensics carving tools.
Digital Assembly recently completed a collaborative research and development agreement with the Defense Cyber Crime Institute, a research and development organization within DC3, to integrate Digital Assembly’s file carving technology, called SmartCarving™, into DCCI_StegCarver and DC3 Carver — file carving tools that are distributed to government and law enforcement agencies throughout the country. The SmartCarving™ technology improves a forensic investigator’s ability to recover, sort and reconstruct fragmented jpeg photographs that have been erased from suspect media.
Dr. Nasir Memon, professor of computer science and engineering, first developed the groundbreaking technology after talking to DoD cyber security investigators who told him that the current data-based file carving systems were slow and inefficient. They told him they often spent an entire day manually reconstructing an erased photo that they needed for evidence or to prevent a security incident. Dr. Memon and students of NYU-Poly’s Information Systems and Internet Security lab set about developing file carving software specifically for images. They subsequently formed Digital Assembly, which became a leading provider of advance photo forensics solutions for professionals and home use. It is headquartered in one of the school’s business accelerators and has become an example of NYU-Poly’s philosophy of invention, innovation and entrepreneurship.
“Today’s digital media is a hostile environment for an investigator,” said Pasha Pal, chief technical officer of Digital Assembly. “The increasing size of photo files and numbers of operating systems combine to make forensic investigations difficult. Tools must be able to search and recover files accidentally fragmented and lost as well as those purposefully erased. The integration of SmartCarving™ technology into DCCI’s forensic carving tools will provide a capability that is not readily available in traditional forensic carving tools.”
About Digital Assembly
Digital Assembly is a New York-based startup developing innovative digital forensics solutions. The company introduced SmartCarving™ and SmartFiltering™ technologies to help forensic investigators recover and analyze photo evidence quickly and easily. The company released its latest version of Adroit Photo Forensics on May 5, 2010. The company’s customers include the FBI, intelligence communities, forensic investigators and leading law firms. For more information, visit http://digital-assembly.com.
About Polytechnic Institute of New York University
Polytechnic Institute of New York University (formerly Polytechnic University), an affiliate of New York University, is one of New York City’s most comprehensive schools of engineering, applied sciences, technology, and research, and is rooted in a 156-year tradition of invention, innovation, and entrepreneurship: i2e.
The institution, founded in 1854, is one of the nation’s oldest private engineering schools. In addition to its main campus at MetroTech Center in downtown Brooklyn, it offers programs at sites throughout the region and around the globe. NYU-Poly has centers in Long Island, Manhattan and Westchester County; globally, it has programs in Israel, China and will be an integral part of NYU's campus in Abu Dhabi opening in autumn 2010.
About DC3
The Department of Defense Cyber Crime Center serves as one of the designated national cyber centers and is designated as the DoD Center of Excellence to establish DoD standards for digital and multimedia forensics in coordination with the DoD Components. The DC3 delivers capability through five organizations: the Defense Computer Forensics Laboratory, Department of Defense's only accredited lab for conducting deep forensic examinations of electronic media; the Defense Cyber Investigations Training Academy, a training center to create DoD cyber crime investigators and digital forensic examiners; the Defense Cyber Crime Institute, which performs research, development, test and validation for software and hardware in forensic applications; the National Cyber Investigative Joint Task Force/Analytical Group, an interagency collaboration; and the Defense Industrial Base Collaborative Information Sharing Environment, the DoD clearinghouse and focal point for the referral of intrusion events affecting the Defense Industrial Base. The DC3 operates under the executive agency of the Secretary of the Air Force For more information, visit http://www.dc3.mil/home.php.
