Forsigs trials produce impressive results
21 March 2011
Forsigs Ltd, the LJMU technology spin out company, is continuing to make rapid progress in developing its portfolio of products in the field of Digital Forensics.
LJMU is the majority shareholder in Forsigs and the company provides a commercialisation vehicle for technologies developed in LJMU’s School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences.
While the company holds technology that has a number of applications, initially the focus is on using the technology to tackle the challenges of digital forensic investigations involving the search for illegal, malicious multimedia.
The Forsigs software uses a ‘fingerprint’ of malicious files to triage and automatically search evidentiary data. Using this innovative approach, Forsigs is able to detect not only complete, resident files but also deleted files, file fragments or files that have been embedded into other application data. Forsigs thus provides comprehensive, fast and accurate automated analysis of data while minimising the need to view material, thereby helping to protect practitioners from the psychological burden of undertaking such investigations.
The intellectual property central to the technology was originally developed by Dr John Haggerty and Dr David Llewellyn-Jones of LJMU’s School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences and was the subject of a number of years research before being formally protected.
There has been growing interest in the Forsigs technology from law enforcement agencies at home and abroad. Merseyside Police High Tech Crime Unit (MPHTCU) has played a valuable part in helping LJMU to trial and validate the forensic signature technology of Forsigs.
The results of these trials have been encouraging, setting Forsigs above other, similar technologies in the market place in the following ways:
- Faster: results show that Forsigs is nearly 10 times faster than systems currently used by UK High Tech Crime Units
- Detection capability: checks slack space – detects deleted images; can detect partially overwritten images
- Portability: the compact fingerprint format makes the large databases of search images used by the Police manageable on a USB stick
David Llewellyn-Jones said: "It’s exciting to see the Forsigs work develop from a research idea on paper to a practical tool with the potential to provide significant real-world benefits."
For more information, please contact Jon Barrett on: j.barrett@ljmu.ac.uk or call: 07968 422558.
