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txt

Network Working Group D. Brezinski

Request for Comments: 3227 In-Q-Tel

BCP: 55 T. Killalea

Category: Best Current Practice neart.org

February 2002

Guidelines for Evidence Collection and Archiving

Status of this Memo

This document specifies an Internet Best Current Practices for the

Internet Community, and requests discussion and suggestions for

improvements. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

Copyright Notice

Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2002). All Rights Reserved.

Abstract

A "security incident" as defined in the "Internet Security Glossary",

RFC 2828, is a security-relevant system event in which the system's

security policy is disobeyed or otherwise breached. The purpose of

this document is to provide System Administrators with guidelines on

the collection and archiving of evidence relevant to such a security

incident.

If evidence collection is done correctly, it is much more useful in

apprehending the attacker, and stands a much greater chance of being

admissible in the event of a prosecution.

Table of Contents

1 Introduction.................................................... 2

1.1 Conventions Used in this Document........................... 2

2 Guiding Principles during Evidence Collection................... 3

2.1 Order of Volatility......................................... 4

2.2 Things to avoid............................................. 4

2.3 Privacy Considerations...................................... 5

2.4 Legal Considerations........................................ 5

3 The Collection Procedure........................................ 6

3.1 Transparency................................................ 6

3.2 Collection Steps............................................ 6

4 The Archiving Procedure......................................... 7

4.1 Chain of Custody............................................ 7

4.2 The Archive................................................. 7

5 Tools you'll need............................................... 7

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RFC 3227 Evidence Collection and Archiving February 2002

6 References...................................................... 8

7 Acknowledgements................................................ 8

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8 Security Considerations......................................... 8

9 Authors' Addresses.............................................. 9

10 Full Copyright Statement.......................................10

1 Introduction

A "security incident" as defined in [RFC2828] is a security-relevant

system event in which the system's security policy is disobeyed or

otherwise breached. The purpose of this document is to provide

System Administrators with guidelines on the collection and archiving

of evidence relevant to such a security incident. It's not our

intention to insist that all System Administrators rigidly follow

these guidelines every time they have a security incident. Rather,

we want to provide guidance on what they should do if they elect to

collect and protect information relating to an intrusion.

Such collection represents a considerable effort on the part of the

System Administrator. Great progress has been made in recent years

to speed up the re-installation of the Operating System and to

facilitate the reversion of a system to a 'known' state, thus making

the 'easy option' even more attractive. Meanwhile little has been

done to provide easy ways of archiving evidence (the difficult

option). Further, increasing disk and memory capacities and the more

widespread use of stealth and cover-your-tracks tactics by attackers

have exacerbated the problem.

If evidence collection is done correctly, it is much more useful in

apprehending the attacker, and stands a much greater chance of being

admissible in the event of a prosecution.

You should use these guidelines as a basis for formulating your

site's evidence collection procedures, and should incorporate your

site's procedures into your Incident Handling documentation. The

guidelines in this document may not be appropriate under all

jurisdictions. Once you've formulated your site's evidence

collection procedures, you should have law enforcement for your

jurisdiction confirm that they're adequate.

1.1 Conventions Used in this Document

The key words "REQUIRED", "MUST", "MUST NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT",

and "MAY" in this document are to be interpreted as described in "Key

words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels" [RFC2119].

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RFC 3227 Evidence Collection and Archiving February 2002

2 Guiding Principles during Evidence Collection

- Adhere to your site's Security Policy and engage the

appropriate Incident Handling and Law Enforcement personnel.

- Capture as accurate a picture of the system as possible.

- Keep detailed notes. These should include dates and times. If

possible generate an automatic transcript. (e.g., On Unix

systems the 'script' program can be used, however the output

file it generates should not be to media that is part of the

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evidence). Notes and print-outs should be signed and dated.

- Note the difference between the system clock and UTC. For each

timestamp provided, indicate whether UTC or local time is used.

- Be prepared to testify (perhaps years later) outlining all

actions you took and at what times. Detailed notes will be

vital.

- Minimise changes to the data as you are collecting it. This is

not limited to content changes; you should avoid updating file

or directory access times.

- Remove external avenues for change.

- When confronted with a choice between collection and analysis

you should do collection first and analysis later.

- Though it hardly needs stating, your procedures should be

implementable. As with any aspect of an incident response

policy, procedures should be tested to ensure feasibility,

particularly in a crisis. If possible procedures should be

automated for reasons of speed and accuracy. Be methodical.

- For each device, a methodical approach should be adopted which

follows the guidelines laid down in your collection procedure.

Speed will often be critical so where there are a number of

devices requiring examination it may be appropriate to spread

the work among your team to collect the evidence in parallel.

However on a single given system collection should be done step

by step.

- Proceed from the volatile to the less volatile (see the Order

of Volatility below).

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- You should make a bit-level copy of the system's media. If you

wish to do forensics analysis you should make a bit-level copy

of your evidence copy for that purpose, as your analysis will

almost certainly alter file access times. Avoid doing

forensics on the evidence copy.

2.1 Order of Volatility

When collecting evidence you should proceed from the volatile to the

less volatile. Here is an example order of volatility for a typical

system.

- registers, cache

- routing table, arp cache, process table, kernel statistics,

memory

- temporary file systems

- disk

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- remote logging and monitoring data that is relevant to the

system in question

- physical configuration, network topology

- archival media

2.2 Things to avoid

It's all too easy to destroy evidence, however inadvertently.

- Don't shutdown until you've completed evidence collection.

Much evidence may be lost and the attacker may have altered the

startup/shutdown scripts/services to destroy evidence.

- Don't trust the programs on the system. Run your evidence

gathering programs from appropriately protected media (see

below).

- Don't run programs that modify the access time of all files on

the system (e.g., 'tar' or 'xcopy').

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- When removing external avenues for change note that simply

disconnecting or filtering from the network may trigger

"deadman switches" that detect when they're off the net and

wipe evidence.

2.3 Privacy Considerations

- Respect the privacy rules and guidelines of your company and

your legal jurisdiction. In particular, make sure no

information collected along with the evidence you are searching

for is available to anyone who would not normally have access

to this information. This includes access to log files (which

may reveal patterns of user behaviour) as well as personal data

files.

- Do not intrude on people's privacy without strong

justification. In particular, do not collect information from

areas you do not normally have reason to access (such as

personal file stores) unless you have sufficient indication

that there is a real incident.

- Make sure you have the backing of your company's established

procedures in taking the steps you do to collect evidence of an

incident.

2.4 Legal Considerations

Computer evidence needs to be

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- Admissible: It must conform to certain legal rules before it

can be put before a court.

- Authentic: It must be possible to positively tie evidentiary

material to the incident.

- Complete: It must tell the whole story and not just a

particular perspective.

- Reliable: There must be nothing about how the evidence was

collected and subsequently handled that casts doubt about its

authenticity and veracity.

- Believable: It must be readily believable and understandable

by a court.

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3 The Collection Procedure

Your collection procedures should be as detailed as possible. As is

the case with your overall Incident Handling procedures, they should

be unambiguous, and should minimise the amount of decision-making

needed during the collection process.

3.1 Transparency

The methods used to collect evidence should be transparent and

reproducible. You should be prepared to reproduce precisely the

methods you used, and have those methods tested by independent

experts.

3.2 Collection Steps

- Where is the evidence? List what systems were involved in the

incident and from which evidence will be collected.

- Establish what is likely to be relevant and admissible. When

in doubt err on the side of collecting too much rather than not

enough.

- For each system, obtain the relevant order of volatility.

- Remove external avenues for change.

- Following the order of volatility, collect the evidence with

tools as discussed in Section 5.

- Record the extent of the system's clock drift.

- Question what else may be evidence as you work through the

collection steps.

- Document each step.

- Don't forget the people involved. Make notes of who was there

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and what were they doing, what they observed and how they

reacted.

Where feasible you should consider generating checksums and

cryptographically signing the collected evidence, as this may make it

easier to preserve a strong chain of evidence. In doing so you must

not alter the evidence.

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RFC 3227 Evidence Collection and Archiving February 2002

4 The Archiving Procedure

Evidence must be strictly secured. In addition, the Chain of Custody

needs to be clearly documented.

4.1 Chain of Custody

You should be able to clearly describe how the evidence was found,

how it was handled and everything that happened to it.

The following need to be documented

- Where, when, and by whom was the evidence discovered and

collected.

- Where, when and by whom was the evidence handled or examined.

- Who had custody of the evidence, during what period. How was

it stored.

- When the evidence changed custody, when and how did the

transfer occur (include shipping numbers, etc.).

4.2 Where and how to Archive

If possible commonly used media (rather than some obscure storage

media) should be used for archiving.

Access to evidence should be extremely restricted, and should be

clearly documented. It should be possible to detect unauthorised

access.

5 Tools you'll need

You should have the programs you need to do evidence collection and

forensics on read-only media (e.g., a CD). You should have prepared

such a set of tools for each of the Operating Systems that you manage

in advance of having to use it.

Your set of tools should include the following:

- a program for examining processes (e.g., 'ps').

- programs for examining system state (e.g., 'showrev',

'ifconfig', 'netstat', 'arp').

- a program for doing bit-to-bit copies (e.g., 'dd', 'SafeBack').

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RFC 3227 Evidence Collection and Archiving February 2002

- programs for generating checksums and signatures (e.g.,

'sha1sum', a checksum-enabled 'dd', 'SafeBack', 'pgp').

- programs for generating core images and for examining them

(e.g., 'gcore', 'gdb').

- scripts to automate evidence collection (e.g., The Coroner's

Toolkit [FAR1999]).

The programs in your set of tools should be statically linked, and

should not require the use of any libraries other than those on the

read-only media. Even then, since modern rootkits may be installed

through loadable kernel modules, you should consider that your tools

might not be giving you a full picture of the system.

You should be prepared to testify to the authenticity and reliability

of the tools that you use.

6 References

[FAR1999] Farmer, D., and W Venema, "Computer Forensics Analysis

Class Handouts", http://www.fish.com/forensics/

[RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate

Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.

[RFC2196] Fraser, B., "Site Security Handbook", FYI 8, RFC 2196,

September 1997.

[RFC2350] Brownlee, N. and E. Guttman, "Expectations for Computer

Security Incident Response", FYI 8, RFC 2350, June 1998.

[RFC2828] Shirey, R., "Internet Security Glossary", FYI 36, RFC

2828, May 2000.

7 Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the constructive comments received from

Harald Alvestrand, Byron Collie, Barbara Y. Fraser, Gordon Lennox,

Andrew Rees, Steve Romig and Floyd Short.

8 Security Considerations

This entire document discuses security issues.

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9 Authors' Addresses

Dominique Brezinski

In-Q-Tel

1000 Wilson Blvd., Ste. 2900

Arlington, VA 22209

USA

EMail: [email protected]

Tom Killalea

Lisi/n na Bro/n

Be/al A/tha na Muice

Co. Mhaigh Eo

IRELAND

Phone: +1 206 266-2196

EMail: [email protected]

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RFC 3227 Evidence Collection and Archiving February 2002

10. Full Copyright Statement

Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2002). All Rights Reserved.

This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to

others, and derivative works that comment on or otherwise explain it

or assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied, published

and distributed, in whole or in part, without restriction of any

kind, provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are

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included on all such copies and derivative works. However, this

document itself may not be modified in any way, such as by removing

the copyright notice or references to the Internet Society or other

Internet organizations, except as needed for the purpose of

developing Internet standards in which case the procedures for

copyrights defined in the Internet Standards process must be

followed, or as required to translate it into languages other than

English.

The limited permissions granted above are perpetual and will not be

revoked by the Internet Society or its successors or assigns.

This document and the information contained herein is provided on an

"AS IS" basis and THE INTERNET SOCIETY AND THE INTERNET ENGINEERING

TASK FORCE DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING

BUT NOT LIMITED TO ANY WARRANTY THAT THE USE OF THE INFORMATION

HEREIN WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY RIGHTS OR ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF

MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Acknowledgement

Funding for the RFC Editor function is currently provided by the

Internet Society.

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