On August 7th and 8th, 2001 the first Digital Forensic Research Workshop (DFRWS 2001) was held in Utica, New York. Over 50 university researchers, computer forensic examiners, and analysts attended the workshop. This event was sponsored by the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) Defensive Information Warfare Branch. The Research Roadmap describes the major highlights of key presentations and the outcomes of this workshop.
DFRWS 2002 was hosted by Syracuse University and was open to the public. Attendees came from all over including speakers from Australia and Italy. Challenging issues such as encryption, seismography, and data reduction were discussed in breakout sessions, and the resulting ideas were presented to everyone the end of each day. This event also marked the first forensic games, which have become a tradition of the workshop evening events, including the forensic feud and forensic rodeo. Several papers from this workshop were published in the International Journal of Digital Evidence.
The workshop expanded further in 2003, and was held in Cleveland, Ohio with more papers, more people, and more fun. The DFRWS 2003 also included a tool demonstration session and a panel discussion. This was a very productive workshop, and papers were published in the Journal of Digital Investigation. In addition, the Forensic Rodeo scenario developed by Dan Kalil was contributed to the Honeynet Project.
Over 100 attendees met in Baltimore, Maryland between August 11th - 13th, 2004 for DFRWS 2004. Speakers came from England and Africa to discuss the state and future of the field. The overarching theme of this workshop was "In-time" forensics. The workshop also hosted the Hashapalooza, a half-day event arranged by the National Institute of Standards and Testing's NSRL group.
Frank Adelstein, Brian Carrier, Eoghan Casey, Golden Richard, and Vassil Roussev became the main organizers of the annual workshop and DFRWS became a 501(c) non-profit organization.
The 2005 workshop was held in the French Quarter of New Orleans, LA (less than two weeks before it was flooded from Hurricane Katrina). Because of the great restaurants in the area, a new breakout discussion approach was taken and attendees signed up for lunch at different places and each had a different topic. A challenge was issued before the 2005 workshop to analyze a memory image of a Windows system and new tools were developed to tackle the problem. As a result of the workshop, the first DFRWS Technical Working Group was formed. The Common Digital Evidence Storage Format (CDESF) working group is working to define a standard method for storing digital evidence.
The 2006 conference was held in Lafayette, Indiana (near Purdue University). It attracted people from all over the world and included presentations, tool demos, and the annual rodeo (which was created by Wetstone). The forensic challenge had many submissions and new tools were developed to better carve unallocated data.
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DFRWS is a US 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.