Imagine the university that employs you as an information se

Imagine the university that employs you as an information security professional has recently identified the need to design and build a digital forensic laboratory. You have been tasked with designing the lab for the organization.

1. Explicate the steps you would take to plan a budget for the lab, keeping in mind the general business objective to avoid unneeded costs.
2. Recommend the physical requirements and controls that you would consider implementing in order to keep the lab safe and secure.
3. Identify at least three (3) hardware and software tools that you would include in the design of the lab and explain your reasons behind your choices.

Solution

1. Explicate the steps you would take to plan a budget for the lab, keeping in mind the general business objective to avoid unneeded costs:

Step1: Requirement analysis - Check the hardware and software requirements, requirement for technicians and resources

Step2: Setting up the equipment - Check the cost of training the team to set up and use the equipment. It also includes setting up the security equipments for the lab.

Step3: Executing the tasks - Check the cost of execution of tasks.

Step4: Maintainance - Check the cost of equipments and manpower required to maintain the lab.

2. Recommend the physical requirements and controls that you would consider implementing in order to keep the lab safe and secure:

The security of the lab can be maintained by:

1. Giving authorized access to lab - Only trusted people can have the access to lab. This can be done by installing fingerprint sensors at turnstiles at the lab entry point.

2. Using secure equipment - Passwords are provided to all the resources/technicians working in the lab.

3. Giving authorized access to critical data - OTP to be entered at the time of accessing any critical data.

3. Identify at least three (3) hardware and software tools that you would include in the design of the lab and explain your reasons behind your choices:

Hardwares:

1. Power station - Used for massive parallel processing and computation.

2. Forensic duplicator - Used for forensic disk-to-file or disk-to-disk duplication

Softwares:

1. Guidance software - Provides solutions for computer investigations and forensics.

2. Passware - Provides solution for encrypted evidence discovery, encryption analysis, password recovery and decryption.