by Hannu Visti
Creating test material for computer forensic teaching or tool testing purposes has been a known problem. I encountered the issue in my studies of Computer Forensics at the University of Westminster. We were assigned a task to compare computer forensic tools and report results. Having already analysed test images by Brian Carrier (http://dftt.sourceforge.net) over and over again, I found myself creating images manually, which appears to be the best and only way of doing this. One of my lecturers, Sean Tohill, confirmed this is indeed the case and a test image generator is long overdue.
The need for such a tool is twofold. In educational setting, the problem of plagiarism can be mitigated by giving each student an individual image to analyse. In application quality testing, one of the tests should be to feed several similar but not identical images to the forensic tool, and compare results, which should be identical…
