International Research Journal of Engineering and Technology (IRJET)
e-ISSN: 2395-0056
Volume: 13 Issue: 01 | Jan 2026
p-ISSN: 2395-0072
www.irjet.net
A Comparative Analysis of Digital Forensics Tools Based on Performance Parameters Aditya Choudhary1 Aditya Choudhary Department of Computer Applications Maharaja Surajmal Institute New Delhi, India ---------------------------------------------------------------------***---------------------------------------------------------------------
Abstract - Digital forensics is essential for investigating cyber incidents because modern crimes leave digital traces on devices and services. A wide range of tools — both commercial and open-source — help examiners acquire, analyze, and report on evidence. This paper compares four widely used forensic tools (EnCase, FTK, Autopsy, and X-Ways) against practical performance parameters: acquisition/processing speed, accuracy/recovery, usability, platform and file-system support, resource usage, reporting, and cost. The comparison is based on vendor documentation, standards guidance, and recent comparative studies. The goal is to help students and beginner investigators choose tools appropriate to their needs and resources.
Keywords -Digital Forensics, Cybersecurity, Digital Evidence, Forensic Tools, Performance Analysis I. Introduction Most people use devices and cloud services nowadays, so cybercrime is not something that hardly ever happens. It is affecting both individuals and companies all around us. When something bad happens on the internet the people who investigate need to find evidence to understand what exactly went wrong. But there is a problem: digital evidence can be easily ruined if you are not careful with it. That is where digital forensics comes into play helping with evidence and cybercrime and that is why digital forensics is so important, for solving cybercrime cases and dealing with digital evidence. The digital evidence system provides investigators with the methods and tools to collect protect study and present digital evidence in ways that courts and investigations trust. The tools you choose are very important. They decide how quickly you can work and how information you can find.The tools also decide whether your findings will be accepted when someone questions them. So it is not just the experts who want to know which tools are the students and people who are new, to this field want to know too. The digital evidence system is something that students and newcomers care about because they want to use the tools to do their job. In this paper, I break down the main digital forensic tools, pulling info from public docs and fresh research, and lay out a clear, beginner-friendly comparison.
II. Background and Standards The National Institute of Standards and Technology or NIST for short has guidance documents that tell you how to handle evidence. These documents from the National Institute of Standards and Technology along with other sources say what you need to do to keep evidence safe and make sure it can be used in court. You must do things like display evidence protect it gather it review it examine it and then evaluate and report on it. If you follow these guidelines from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, you can be sure that the evidence you collect during an investigation will be good and legal. This is important, for an investigation. The National Institute of Standards and Technology or NIST has a Special Publication called 800.86. This publication is like a guide for people who must figure out what happens when a crime is committed using computers. People who study this sort of thing and people who do this work are very interested in comparing the tools that are available to help with this process. They want to know which tools are easy to use and which ones work well when it comes to dealing with crimes that happen on computers and they want to do this in a way that's fair and legal. The findings from these reviews provide a means for synthesizing previously published data about the respective strengths and weaknesses of both types of forensic software tools.
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