Bio-hacked humans and digital forensic issues…

If you thought The Grudge was the scariest thing you’ve seen on screen, you must have not yet watched Showtime’s ‘The Dark Net’.  In short, the series show how humans are procreating less and merging digitally into technology with bio-hacks. That makes for a bad combination on a few different levels.

Without getting into non-techical issues (such as moral, ethical, or legal), I have a technical question: How the heck are we going to going to do a forensic analysis of a bio-hacked…human?

Before the human race ends up looking like robots, we are already in the era of implanting electronic data devices in our bodies.  Check out http://dangerousthings.com to find how you too can jab an injection device into your hand and shoot a RFID under your skin…all by doing it yourself. As for me, I don’t think I’ll be joining in that movement anytime soon.

RFID (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio-frequency_identification) tags store data. Data such as medical, financial, personal, or any type of information can be stored on a RFID tag, although the amount is quite limited currently (2-10 kilobytes?).  That’s not much data, but depending on the content, it may be more than enough to cause a war or bankrupt a company.

But even at that low amount of storage, it can raise suspicions in theft of intellectual property, trade secrets, or national security information.  Imagine the use of implanted RFID chips by criminals, terrorists, and corporate spies to exfiltrate and transport sensitive data.  Just when you thought the MicroSD cards presented a threat because of their small sizes, the RFID is even an even bigger problem.  We can find a USB since we can see it. RFID chips implanted under the skin…not so easy.

Now back to my first question of how we will be doing forensic analysis on a bio-hacked human. When the time arrives where humans are embedded with multiple types of technology and devices, where and how do we start the data acquisition process?   Depending on how much technology is embedded, where it is embedded, and what it is connected to, forensic imaging takes on a whole new world.  

And what if the person (or man-machine cyborg…) doesn’t want to be forensically analyzed? 

Maybe for imaging software, we can try Robocopy (looks like the software is already here….).

http://sourceforge.net/projects/robocoprobocopy/