Evidence Preserving Hard Disk Unlocking System

Luna Innovations will design and develop a hard disk unlocking system that is easily usable by forensic technicians while preserving evidentiary integrity. Our solution will be robust even against anticipated future drive features and drives modified by criminals to have certain anti-tamper properties. This is important as it is nearly certain that manufacturers or criminals will develop such countermeasures to a system that was not designed with such foresight. Examples in related technology include modern flash drives which employ encryption, authentication, and anti-tamper technologies, like the IronKey (www.ironkey.com) and others. We will design our system to be user friendly: specifically, it will illustrate to the user exactly what must be done with a given drive. The system will also optionally make a copy of the entire drive for exploration by LEOs for leads. Law enforcement personnel will be able to access and copy password-protected hard disk drives quickly and with confidence in maintaining evidence integrity for later prosecution. Our tool will provide an intuitive, pedagogical user interface that will allow departments to empower forensic technicians with a new capability in the field that hitherto had required engineers in a laboratory setting. Commercial applications include state and local forensic teams as well as federally approved sales to foreign police services. This expanded market will benefit communities by placing the resource close to more searches in order to obtain timely clues to related criminal efforts. Indeed, such functionality will be needed in the future as more sophisticated criminals use computers to organize their enterprises.