Digital forensic units are facing ever increasing backlogs, leading to delays in the processing of potentially crucial evidence. Coupled with the exponential growth of data stored on digital devices, meeting the demands of digital forensic is a significant challenge.

The opportunity to automate non-complex and repetative tasks can provide substantial time saving benefits, but only if the outputs of the automated can be trusted.

Reli supported a national UK goverment project to test and validate automation in digital forensic processes, using command line interface/application programme interface (CLI/API) and robotic processing automation (RPA) techniques.

Designing and implementing a robust and rigorous test regime, we validated the automated processes to the requirements of ISO/IEC 17025:2017 and the Forensic Science Regulator’s Codes of Practice, demonstrating the strengths and weaknesses of the different techniques and providing a template that could be used by digital forensic units to implement and validate their own automated processes.