Validating mobile forensic metamodel using tracing method

Abstract

Mobile Forensic (MF) is a branch of digital forensic used to collect and analyze mobile device crimes. Several forensic models and frameworks have been proposed in the literature for the MF domain to identify, acquire, and investigate MF crimes. However, these models are redundant and developed for specific purposes. Therefore, the authors developed a metamodel to solve the redundancy and heterogeneity of the MF domain called Mobile Forensic Metamodel (MFM). However, the MFM has not been evaluated from the modeling perspective to evaluate the effectiveness of the MFM in terms of instantiation solution models for the MF domain. Thus, this paper aims to evaluate the effectiveness of the MFM using a tracing method. The tracing method is a common way of validating metamodels through reasonable reliability on the domain application of the metamodel to assess the logical consistency of metamodels against domain models. For this purpose, two real scenarios were selected to confirm the capabilities of developed MFM in instantiate solution models for problems in hands. From real scenarios, the developed MFM was found to be scalable, logical, complete, interoperable, coherent, and useful for the MFM domain.