This is a Secure Design Assessment on Mobile Verification Toolkit and Android Quick Forensics, offered as a contribution to the community that builds and sustains these tools, and as a model for how security and usability analysis from an interdisciplinary work can help improve tools that human right defenders depend on.
Consensual Digital Forensics is a field of knowledge created by human rights defenders and technologists working in the civil society, to respond to the growing threat of sophisticated spyware deployed against Human Right Defenders.
We decided to take the real-world workflows as our scope of study, which included mapping the extent of their use, identifying key users and organizations within the community, and documenting emerging operational practices.
Secure Design Assessment: This report includes a threat model that establishes actors involved, what is at risk, and five threat scenarios that frame the adversary’s capabilities. It also makes an overview of how encryption, key management and bundle integrity are implemented in the current codebase, and the architectural review examines the workflow along four topics: Untrusted input handling, forensic soundness, case isolation and network boundaries and analytical clarity and actionability.
REPORT: To be published soon
Heuristic Analysis: A heuristic evaluation is a method for identifying design problems in a user interface. We organized Nielsen’s heuristics into three thematic areas: foster trust and transparency, optimize user critical cognition, and craft the interaction framework, and documented the usability issues encountered during an actual extraction and acquisition workflows.
REPORT: To be published soon
Consensual Digital Forensic Community Survey: The report presents findings from a survey of consensual digital forensics practitioners conducted in December 2025 - February 2026. The survey collected responses from practitioners across multiple countries, focusing on their roles, organizational contexts, tooling preferences and pains, and workflow processes.