Currently, it is not practical for any single software system to perform forensically acceptable verification of the contents of all possible file systems on a disk, let alone the contents of more esoteric peripherals. Recent court decisions that require judges to restrict testimony based on their understanding of the validity of the science behind it will only make such verification even more difficult. This problem, critical to forensic examiners, is actually symptomatic of a larger problem,

more »

... hich lies partly in the domain of digital forensics and partly in the domain of pure computer science. Lack of verifiability, along with a host of other problems, points to inadequate formal description of file systems and I/O methodology. A review of the literature finds, in fact, that little effort has been put into such formalization. We assert that a constructive formalization of peripheral input and output for a computer can address this and several other concerns.