EVOLUTION OF FORENSIC TOOLS: A TECHNICAL AND HISTORICAL OVERVIEW

AUTHOR – KANNAN KARLMARX* & MS. ANNA JOHN**

* STUDENT AT SCHOOL OF LAW, VELS INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND ADVANCED STUDIES (VISTAS)

** ASSISTANT PROFESSOR AT SCHOOL OF LAW, VELS INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND ADVANCED STUDIES (VISTAS)

BEST CITATION – KANNAN KARLMARX & MS. ANNA JOHN, EVOLUTION OF FORENSIC TOOLS: A TECHNICAL AND HISTORICAL OVERVIEW, INDIAN JOURNAL OF LEGAL REVIEW (IJLR), 6 (6) OF 2026, PG. 653-665, APIS – 3920 – 0001 & ISSN – 2583-2344. DOI – https://doi.org/10.65393/IJLRV6I6467

ABSTRACT

Digital forensic tools constitute the indispensable epistemological bridge between latent electronically stored information and admissible evidence in a court of law. This chapter advances a comprehensive technical and jurisprudential analysis of the four generational epochs of digital forensic tool development — spanning disk-imaging utilities of the 1990s, network and volatile-memory forensics of the early 2000s, the mobile-device and cloud extraction paradigm of the 2008–2018 decade, and the contemporary era of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning-driven forensic analytics — and critically evaluates their corresponding legal ramifications within the Indian criminal justice architecture. The analysis demonstrates that while forensic tool capabilities have advanced through four distinct and increasingly complex technological generations, the Indian evidentiary framework — most notably Sections 65A and 65B of the Indian Evidence Act, 1872, and their successor provisions under the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam (BSA), 2023 — has remained tethered to procedural hardware authentication rather than demanding substantive scientific validation of the software algorithms employed. Drawing upon comparative analysis of the United States’ Daubert standard, the NIST Computer Forensics Tool Testing (CFTT) programme, and the epistemological debate between open-source and proprietary forensic paradigms, the chapter identifies a structural validation deficit at the heart of Indian digital evidentiary doctrine. It further examines the constitutional tensions generated by memory forensics under Article 21 of the Indian Constitution as interpreted in K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017), the sovereignty challenges posed by cloud-based evidence extraction, and the profound “algorithmic black box” crisis introduced by AI forensics into courtroom admissibility standards. The chapter concludes with a normative argument for the immediate legislative establishment of an independent Digital Forensic Tools Regulatory Authority, mandated to conduct mandatory empirical validation of all forensic software prior to its deployment in criminal proceedings, thereby restoring the constitutional integrity of digital evidence in India.

Keywords: Digital Forensic Tools; Electronic Evidence; Section 65B; Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam;

EnCase; FTK; Cellebrite UFED; Volatility Framework; Artificial Intelligence Forensics; Daubert Standard; NIST CFTT; Open-Source Forensics; Cloud Forensics; Algorithmic Black Box; India.