Revisiting the dataset gap problem – On availability, assessment and perspective of mobile forensic corpora

Digital forensic corpora are essential for education, academic research, tool development and testing. Due to the increasing pervasiveness of mobile devices like smartphones or tablets, the need for mobile forensic datasets is growing, too. However, publications in the IT forensic community show that there is a large gap in publicly available datasets. In this work we focus on mobile digital forensic corpora as one of the main fields of missing datasets and aim at shifting the focus of the digital forensic community on this topic. In order to do so, we provide three main contributions. We first perform a structured search for mobile forensic corpora and show that 31 publicly available mobile forensic corpora exist, 9 of them more than 5 years old and 18 of them more than 3 years old. Second, we assess these datasets with respect to its content compared to an ordinary real mobile image and conclude that most of the 31 datasets contain too few traces to be considered as realistic. Finally, we propose how to proceed to solve the presumable problem of missing mobile forensic datasets.