Large language models (LLMs) have seen widespread adoption in many domains
including digital forensics. While prior research has largely centered on case
studies and examples demonstrating how LLMs can assist forensic investigations,
deeper explorations remain limited, i.e., a standardized approach for precise
performance evaluations is lacking. Inspired by the NIST Computer Forensic Tool
Testing Program, this paper proposes a standardized methodology to
quantitatively evaluate the application of LLMs for digital forensic tasks,
specifically in timeline analysis. The paper describes the components of the
methodology, including the dataset, timeline generation, and ground truth
development. Additionally, the paper recommends using BLEU and ROUGE metrics
for the quantitative evaluation of LLMs through case studies or tasks involving
timeline analysis. Experimental results using ChatGPT demonstrate that the
proposed methodology can effectively evaluate LLM-based forensic timeline
analysis. Finally, we discuss the limitations of applying LLMs to forensic
timeline analysis.