We invite contributions in five categories: research papers, presentation proposals, panel proposals, workshop proposals, and demo proposals.

RESEARCH PAPERS undergo double-blinded, peer review, and are published by Elsevier in a special issue of Digital Investigation.

PRESENTATIONS, POSTERS, and DEMOS undergo a light review process to select presentations of maximal interest to DFRWS attendees, and filter out sales pitches. Presentation proposals must specify their target length from the following options: 20 minutes, 120 minutes (2 hours), or 240 minutes (4 hours). Note, 2-4 hour presentations are referred to as ‘workshops’ described below.

WORKSHOPS can be several hours or full day, and typically include hands-on participation by attendees, allowing for an in-depth, detailed exploration of tools and techniques of interest to DFRWS attendees. Workshops can and they can cover state-of-the-art research projects, useful tips and techniques for standard tools, or most anything that DFRWS attendees would consider beneficial. While commercial tools can be used, these workshops or tutorials should NOT be thinly-veiled commercial advertisements.

DFRWS will provide one free conference registration for each tutorial and workshop accepted.

Student award and student scholarship program

DFRWS continues its outreach to students studying digital forensics. DFRWS and its sponsors will award one or more Student Travel Scholarships each year. One scholarship will be awarded to the Best Student Research Paper awardee and include a monitary award of $599. More travel scholarships may be awarded, depending on sponsorship funding each year. Scholarships are free registration and accomodation at the conference hotel. DFRWS will notify the recipient of the Best Student Research Paper award on or before the conference registration deadline. Other awards (e.g. industry sponsored awards for research in specific topic areas) may be awarded after the registration deadline and are fully contingent on scholarship sponsorship by industry each year. Refer below for further details regarding eligibility, funding and selection.

ELIGIBILITY: Students must be co-authors on research paper submissions—presentation session presenters and poster presenters are not eligible. The student recipient of the Best Student Research Paper award must be the lead author on the paper being awarded. Student recipients of other travel scholarships (i.e. research paper awards on specific topics of interest funded by industry sponsors) must be co-authors, but they need not be lead authors. Awarded students must be the presenter of the paper for which the award was given at the conference.

FUNDING: Students will receive a code for free registration after being chosen.  If a student has already registered, the fee can be refunded, or a check can be issued. Hotel rooms will be reserved by DFRWS and assigned to the students. The Best Student Paper monitary award will be provided at the conference.

SELECTION: Student travel scholarship recipients will be selected by a student scholarship committee, consisting of DFRWS Organizing Committee members, DFRWS Board of Directors, and/or industry scholarship sponsors. Award recipients will be selected based on research paper quality (contribution and writing), student contribution to the paper (authorship position), and research topic.

APPLY: Write a letter to usa-scholarship@dfrws.org that includes:
- Which paper they authored
- What their author position is
- Whether they will present their paper
- An explanation of why they should receive a scholarship.

Topics of Interest

• Memory analysis and snapshot acquisition
• Storage forensics, including solid state
• "Big data" forensics, related to collection, analysis, and visualization
• Incident response and live analysis
• Forensics of cloud and virtualized environments
• Malware and targeted attacks (analysis and attribution)
• Network and distributed system forensics
• Event reconstruction methods and tools
• Mobile and embedded device forensics
• Digital evidence storage and preservation
• Data recovery and reconstruction
• Multimedia analysis
• Database forensics
• Tool testing and development
• Digital evidence and the law
• Case studies and trend reports
• Data hiding and discovery
• Anti-forensics and anti-anti-forensics
• Interpersonal communications and social network analysis
• Non-traditional forensic scenarios and approaches (e.g. vehicles, Internet of Things, industrial control systems, and SCADA)
• Archival preservation & reconstruction

The above list is only suggestive. We welcome new, original ideas from people in academia, industry, government, and law enforcement who are interested in sharing their results, knowledge, and experience. Authors are encouraged to demonstrate the applicability of their work to practical issues. Questions about submission topics can be sent via email to: usa-papers@dfrws.org