Email forensics

When?

Wednesday 8 February 2012, 14:00 to 15:00

Where?

39BB02

Open to:

Public, Staff, Students

Speaker:

Prof Les Hatton, Kingston University, London

Email has become an indispensable part of the way people communicate both privately and publicly in the last 25 years. Unfortunately, the extraordinary convenience and efficiency of this medium has attracted its dark side. The result is that the internet is now awash with junk, which we approximately categorise as unsolicited bulk mail, (people trying to sell you stuff without hiding themselves), spam (people trying to sell you stuff anonymously), or the far more dangerous scams (criminal attempts to steal identities, money and so on).

Email forensics is conveniently split into investigative and preventative forensics. In investigative work, we are trying to determine the provenance of an email – was it sent when it is claimed, was it received and so on. In preventative forensics, we are trying to prevent the flood of mostly criminal junk so we see exactly what we wish to – no more and no less.

As the onus is on forensic scientists to make this medium safe for the public at large, this talk is primarily about preventative forensics. It describes the author's efforts over a three year period to wrench his email address back from the hands of the junk mailers who were bombarding him with around 150,000 messages a day, and what was necessary to achieve the current level of no more than 4 mis-categorised messages per million received. There are lots of examples and measurements and some useful tips on how to eliminate the deluge.

Biography

Les Hatton is managing director of Oakwood Computing Associates Ltd. and is Professor of Forensic Software Engineering at Kingston University, London. As a geophysicist, he was awarded the Conrad Schlumberger prize in 1987 before becoming interested in software reliability and switching careers in the 1990s.

He has published several books and many technical papers and his 1995 book “Safer C” helped promote the use of safer language subsets in embedded control systems and paved the way for the automotive industry's widely-used MISRA C standard. His latest book “Email Forensics: Eliminating Spam, Scams and Phishing” appeared in 2011. He has designed, implemented and/or managed the production of a number of commercial IT systems, including The Safer C toolset, a toolset for detecting defect in C-based systems and Gundalf a marine seismic source modelling package.
His primary interests in computing science are forensic engineering, information security and the theory of large systems evolution.  In mathematics, he is active in several areas including geophysical source modelling, wave propagation, medical image processing, sports biomechanics and modelling the effects of high frequency sound on marine animals.
He is on the editorial boards of IEEE Software and the Journal of Open Research Computation.  In his spare time, he is the guitarist and harmonica player with the Juniper Hill Blues Band.

More information about Les can be found at his personal web site: http://www.leshatton.org