Forensic tranquility: Investigating Crimes on the Dark Web Where No Traditional Digital Evidence Exists

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6239-610-4_35How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Dark web; digital forensics; forensic tranquillity; cybercrime investigation; anonymity networks; intelligence-driven forensics; behavioural analysis; encrypted communications; evidence absence

Abstract

In today’s digital world the dark web has transformed cybercrime by creating spaces where traditional forensic techniques are unsuccessful due to encryption and the absence of obvious digital evidence. This research states the concept of forensic tranquillity, the unique investigative obstacle posed by the lack of an identifiable, digital shadow. The main argument is that investigators must modify their methodologies when standard chain of custody and direct evidence are unobtainable, particularly in domains shaped by modern anonymity networks, temporary marketplaces, encrypted communications, and anomalies. Rather treating these conditions as dead ends, this study focuses on the success of shifting from evidence- dependent to intelligence-driven strategies. By investigating indirect, digital footprints recurring behavioural patterns and linguistic coherence, investigators can extract meaningful, new insights from even minimal traces and even subtle traces can become investigative leads. Furthermore, the paper mainly focuses on how offender’s confidence in their anonymity can lead to blunders that forensic professionals may utilize. These human errors like system logs, IP addresses, and user logins become one of the few reliable entry points for forensic analysis additionally, The discussion highlights legal and ethical implications investigators face when the explaining absence of evidence in a dark web context, especially in cross-border investigations involving multiple jurisdictions. By reframing absence as an investigative condition rather than a failure, this paper presents a human-focused, adaptive point of view on digital forensic. Forensic silence states and promotes the new insights and adaptive thinking approach. Forensic tranquillity refers to crimes scene is quite but not empty.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Iqra Kounain
AU  - Sameera Mahmood
AU  - Ayesha Parveen
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/05/05
TI  - Forensic tranquility: Investigating Crimes on the Dark Web Where No Traditional Digital Evidence Exists
BT  - Proceedings of the First International Conference on Advances in Forensics and Cyber Technologies (ICFACT 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 400
EP  - 417
SN  - 2352-538X
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-610-4_35
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6239-610-4_35
ID  - Kounain2026
ER  -