Digital multimedia audio forensics: past, present and future Mohammed Zakariah 1 & Muhammad Khurram Khan 2 & Hafiz Malik 3 Received: 12 July 2016 /Revised: 8 December 2016 /Accepted: 15 December 2016 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2017 Abstract Digital audio forensics is used for a variety of applications ranging from authenti- cating audio files to link an audio recording to the acquisition device (e.g., microphone), and also linking to the acoustic environment in which the audio recording was made, and identifying traces of coding or transcoding. This survey paper provides an overview of the current state-of-the-art (SOA) in digital audio forensics and highlights some open research problems and future challenges in this active area of research. The paper categorizes the audio file analysis into container and content-based analysis in order to detect the authenticity of the file. Existing SOA, in audio forensics, is discussed based on both container and content-based analysis. The importance of this research topic has encouraged many researchers to contribute in this area; yet, further scopes are available to help researchers and readers expand the body of knowledge. The ultimate goal of this paper is to introduce all information on audio forensics and encourage researchers to solve the unanswered questions. Our survey paper would contribute to this critical research area, which has addressed many serious cases in the past, and help solve many more cases in the future by using advanced techniques with more accurate results. Multimed Tools Appl DOI 10.1007/s11042-016-4277-2 * Muhammad Khurram Khan mkhurram@ksu.edu.sa Mohammed Zakariah mzakariah@ksu.edu.sa Hafiz Malik hafiz@umich.edu 1 College of Computer and Information Sciences, King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia 2 Center of Excellence in Information Assurance (CoEIA), King Saud University, Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia 3 Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Michigan-Dearborn, Dearborn, MI, USA