DFRWS — the Digital Forensic Research Workshop conferences
DFRWS
Access and status
Cost
Paid
Costs money to buy outright — a book, a licence, a registration.
Status
Current
Current as at the verification date below. Standards and tools both move — confirm at source before you rely on it.
What it is
The research conference series for digital forensics, running as DFRWS USA (July), a European edition renamed the Digital Forensics Conference Europe from 2027 (formerly DFRWS EU), DFRWS APAC in the autumn, and a Digital Forensics Doctoral Symposium alongside the European event. Papers are peer-reviewed and published, and the workshop format puts authors in front of practitioners.
Who it is for, and when
Go when you want the work that will be in tools two years from now, or when you have a method you need torn apart by people who will actually do it. The 2026 cycle ran DFRWS USA in July and DFRWS APAC from 19 to 22 October, with European and doctoral-symposium editions announced for March 2027. DFRWS also runs the forensic challenges and publishes past papers openly on the same site.
What it does not cover
It is a research venue, not training: talks assume you already know the artefacts, and nobody will teach you a tool. There is little here on the legal or courtroom side, and the certification and vendor-suite content practitioners often want is at the commercial user conferences instead.
Go to the source
Open at dfrws.org (opens in a new tab)https://dfrws.org/conferences/
Details
- Type
- Conference
- Written for
- AdvancedWorking examinerAdvanced, Working examiner
- Publisher
- DFRWS
- Topics
- conferences, research-publishing, community, validation
- Checked at source
Related entries
DFRWS Conference Proceedings
Partly freeThe peer-reviewed paper track of the DFRWS conferences, which have run since the first workshop in 2001 and now cover three regions — DFRWS USA, DFRWS EU (rebranding as the Digital Forensics Conference Europe) and DFRWS APAC. DFRWS's own submission rules confirm accepted research papers are published as special issues of Forensic Science International: Digital Investigation.
The annual meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, a multidisciplinary body of over 6,500 members organised into twelve sections, one of which is Digital & Multimedia Sciences. The 79th Annual Scientific Conference is scheduled for 15-20 February 2027 at the Rosen Shingle Creek Hotel in Orlando, Florida.
The paper that introduced CASE, the Cyber-investigation Analysis Standard Expression, an open community-developed specification language aligned with the Unified Cyber Ontology for representing and exchanging cyber-investigation information. It is co-authored by a NIST researcher and supersedes the earlier DFAX approach.
Garfinkel, Farrell, Roussev and Dinolt's DFRWS 2009 paper, published in Digital Investigation, arguing that digital forensics could not be a science without shared, redistributable test data, and introducing the corpora — including the real-data disk images and the govdocs document set — that the field went on to use.
The annual research challenges set alongside the DFRWS conferences, with scenario data, documentation and published results kept as repositories in the DFRWS GitHub organisation. Editions available there include 2005 (memory analysis), 2006, 2009 (PlayStation 3), 2012-2013, 2015, 2017 and 2018 (IoT), 2021 (multisource analysis and correlation) and 2023.