A prototype for achieving digital forensic readiness on wireless sensor networks

The field of wireless sensor networking is still a new and upcoming one and, unfortunately, still lacking in terms of digital forensics. All communications between different nodes (also known as motes) are sent out in a broadcast fashion. These broadcasts make it quite difficult to capture data packets forensically whilst retaining integrity and authenticity of the data packets. This paper examines whether and how one can add a digital forensic readiness layer to an existing IEEE 802.15.4 wireless sensor network without any modification to the existing wireless sensor network. This paper also provides demonstrations of a working prototype to show that a digital forensic readiness layer can be added to an existing wireless sensor network, if the prototype adheres to a list of requirements in order to achieve digital forensic readiness in a wireless sensor network environment. This is done by performing several demonstrations which resemble real world wireless sensor network scenarios in order to show that the prototype does indeed add a layer of digital forensic readiness to the existing wireless sensor network.