A security weakness in the technology used by most of the nation’s crime labs to analyze DNA evidence exposed 30 years of crime files to the risk of being hacked, according to a group of forensic and computer scientists. The researchers found that with the help of computer code written by widely available AI software, they could alter the data produced from computerized scans of physical DNA evidence without leaving any trace they had tampered with the records. The vulnerability is likely to have existed in the digital files produced by crime-lab machines since 1995, but recent technological advances make potential tampering much easier now, they said. “Effectively, what we have are data files that are legitimately referred to as the gold standard of forensic science that lack the same level of tamper-evident markings that we require for a paper bag,” said Laura Gaydosh Combs, a forensic scientist and University of New Haven professor who worked on the research.

Full report : Researchers used AI-assisted code to undetectably tamper wth data from computerized scans of physical DNA evidence produced by widely used crime-lab machines.