Building a Forensic Computing Language

The primary goal of this discussion is to motivate the need for the development of a domain-specific language (DSL) focused on the requirements of forensic and security analysis. We argue that, at present, there is no adequate mechanism that a) allows analysts to specify the forensic computation as a tool-agnostic, logical sequence of steps, b) provides a formal specification for tool developers, and c) seamlessly integrates different available tools to provides a complete and extensible solution. We present an initial design sketch for a forensic DSL called nugget, and use it to illustrate the ideas behind our approach.