A near-miss management system architecture for the forensic investigation of software failures

作者：Bella M A Bihina^*; Eloff J H P

来源：Forensic Science International, 2016, 259: 234-245.

DOI：10.1016/j.forsciint.2015.10.007

• Software failure
• Near miss
• Near-miss management system (NMS)
• Digital evidence
• Digital forensics

Digital forensics has been proposed as a methodology for doing root-cause analysis of major software failures for quite a while. Despite this, similar software failures still occur repeatedly. A reason for this is the difficulty of obtaining detailed evidence of software failures. Acquiring such evidence can be challenging, as the relevant data may be lost or corrupt following a software system's crash. This paper proposes the use of near-miss analysis to improve on the collection of evidence for software failures. Near-miss analysis is an incident investigation technique that detects and subsequently analyses indicators of failures. The results of a near-miss analysis investigation are then used to detect an upcoming failure before the failure unfolds. The detection of these indicators - known as near misses therefore provides an opportunity to proactively collect relevant data that can be used as digital evidence, pertaining to software failures. A Near Miss Management System (NMS) architecture for the forensic investigation of software failures is proposed. The viability of the proposed architecture is demonstrated through a prototype.

• 出版日期2016-2