Computer Forensics

Bassel Kateeb Tim Altimus

Introduction
Topics to be covered
Defining Computer Forensics Reasons for gathering evidence Who uses Computer Forensics Steps of Computer Forensics Handling Evidence Investigation initiation / response Handling Information Requirements Anti-Forensics Evidence processing guidelines Methods of hiding Information/data Methods of discovering information/data

Definition
What is Computer Forensics??
Computer forensics involves the preservation, identification, extraction, documentation, and interpretation of computer media for evidentiary and/or root cause analysis. Evidence might be required for a wide range of computer crimes and misuses Multiple methods of
Discovering data on computer system Recovering deleted, encrypted, or damaged file information Monitoring live activity Detecting violations of corporate policy

Information collected assists in arrests, prosecution, termination of employment, and preventing future illegal activity

Definition (cont)
What Constitutes Digital Evidence?
Any information being subject to human intervention or not, that can be extracted from a computer. Must be in human-readable format or capable of being interpreted by a person with expertise in the subject.

Computer Forensics Examples

Recovering thousands of deleted emails Performing investigation post employment termination Recovering evidence post formatting hard drive Performing investigation after multiple users had taken over the system

Reasons For Evidence

Wide range of computer crimes and misuses
Non-Business Environment: evidence collected by Federal, State and local authorities for crimes relating to:
Theft of trade secrets Fraud Extortion Industrial espionage Position of pornography SPAM investigations Virus/Trojan distribution Homicide investigations Intellectual property breaches Unauthorized use of personal information Forgery Perjury

Reasons For Evidence (cont)

Computer related crime and violations include a range of activities including:
Business Environment:
Theft of or destruction of intellectual property Unauthorized activity
Tracking internet browsing habits

Reconstructing Events Inferring intentions Selling company bandwidth Wrongful dismissal claims Sexual harassment Software Piracy

Who Uses Computer Forensics?

Criminal Prosecutors
Rely on evidence obtained from a computer to prosecute suspects and use as evidence

Civil Litigations
Personal and business data discovered on a computer can be used in fraud, divorce, harassment, or discrimination cases

Insurance Companies
Evidence discovered on computer can be used to mollify costs (fraud, workers compensation, arson, etc)

Private Corporations
Obtained evidence from employee computers can be used as evidence in harassment, fraud, and embezzlement cases

Who Uses Computer Forensics? (cont)

Law Enforcement Officials
Rely on computer forensics to backup search warrants and post-seizure handling

Individual/Private Citizens
Obtain the services of professional computer forensic specialists to support claims of harassment, abuse, or wrongful termination from employment

FBI Computer Forensic Services

Content Comparison again known data Transaction sequencing Extraction of data Recovering deleted data files Format conversion Keyword searching Decrypting passwords Analyzing and comparing limited source code

Steps Of Computer Forensics

According to many professionals, Computer Forensics is a four (4) step process
Acquisition
Physically or remotely obtaining possession of the computer, all network mappings from the system, and external physical storage devices

Identification
This step involves identifying what data could be recovered and electronically retrieving it by running various Computer Forensic tools and software suites

Evaluation
Evaluating the information/data recovered to determine if and how it could be used again the suspect for employment termination or prosecution in court

Steps Of Computer Forensics (cont)

Presentation
This step involves the presentation of evidence discovered in a manner which is understood by lawyers, non-technically staff/management, and suitable as evidence as determined by United States and internal laws

Handling Evidence
Admissibility of Evidence
Legal rules which determine whether potential evidence can be considered by a court Must be obtained in a manner which ensures the authenticity and validity and that no tampering had taken place

No possible evidence is damaged, destroyed, or otherwise compromised by the procedures used to search the computer Preventing viruses from being introduced to a computer during the analysis process Extracted / relevant evidence is properly handled and protected from later mechanical or electromagnetic damage

Handling Evidence (cont)

Establishing and maintaining a continuing chain of custody Limiting the amount of time business operations are affected Not divulging and respecting any ethically [and legally] client-attorney information that is inadvertently acquired during a forensic exploration

Initiating An Investigation
DO NOT begin by exploring files on system randomly Establish evidence custodian - start a detailed journal with the date and time and date/information discovered If possible, designate suspected equipment as off-limits to normal activity. This includes back-ups, remotely or locally scheduled house-keeping, and configuration changes Collect email, DNS, and other network service logs

Initiating An Investigation (cont)

Capture exhaustive external TCP and UDP port scans of the host
Could present a problem if TCP is wrapped

Contact security personnel [CERT], management, Federal and local enforcement, as well as affected sites or persons

Incidence Response
Identify, designate, or become evidence custodian Review any existing journal of what has been done to system already and/or how intrusion was detected Begin new or maintain existing journal Install monitoring tools (sniffers, port detectors, etc.) Without rebooting or affecting running processes, perform a copy of physical disk Capture network information

Incidence Response (cont)

Capture processes and files in use (e.g. dll, exe) Capture config information Receipt and signing of data

Handling Information
Information and data being sought after and collected in the investigation must be properly handled Volatile Information
Network Information
Communication between system and the network

Active Processes
Programs and daemons currently active on the system

Logged-on Users
Users/employees currently using system

Open Files
Libraries in use; hidden files; Trojans (rootkit) loaded in system

Handling Information (cont)

Non-Volatile Information
This includes information, configuration settings, system files and registry settings that are available after reboot Accessed through drive mappings from system This information should investigated and reviewed from a backup copy

Computer Forensic Requirements

Hardware
Familiarity with all internal and external devices/components of a computer Thorough understanding of hard drives and settings Understanding motherboards and the various chipsets used Power connections Memory

BIOS
Understanding how the BIOS works Familiarity with the various settings and limitations of the BIOS

Computer Forensic Requirements

Operation Systems
Windows 3.1/95/98/ME/NT/2000/2003/XP DOS UNIX LINUX VAX/VMS

(cont)

Software
Familiarity with most popular software packages such as Office

Forensic Tools
Familiarity with computer forensic techniques and the software packages that could be used

Anti-Forensics
Software that limits and/or corrupts evidence that could be collected by an investigator Performs data hiding and distortion Exploits limitations of known and used forensic tools Works both on Windows and LINUX based systems In place prior to or post system acquisition

Evidence Processing Guidelines

New Technologies Inc. recommends following 16 steps in processing evidence They offer training on properly handling each step
Step 1: Shut down the computer
Considerations must be given to volatile information Prevents remote access to machine and destruction of evidence (manual or ant-forensic software)

Step 2: Document the Hardware Configuration of The System

Note everything about the computer configuration prior to re-locating

Evidence Processing Guidelines (cont)

Step 3: Transport the Computer System to A Secure Location
Do not leave the computer unattended unless it is locked in a secure location

Step 4: Make Bit Stream Backups of Hard Disks and Floppy Disks Step 5: Mathematically Authenticate Data on All Storage Devices
Must be able to prove that you did not alter any of the evidence after the computer came into your possession

Step 6: Document the System Date and Time Step 7: Make a List of Key Search Words Step 8: Evaluate the Windows Swap File

Evidence Processing Guidelines (cont)

Step 9: Evaluate File Slack
File slack is a data storage area of which most computer users are unaware; a source of significant security leakage.

Step 10: Evaluate Unallocated Space (Erased Files) Step 11: Search Files, File Slack and Unallocated Space for Key Words Step 12: Document File Names, Dates and Times Step 13: Identify File, Program and Storage Anomalies Step 14: Evaluate Program Functionality Step 15: Document Your Findings Step 16: Retain Copies of Software Used

Methods Of Hiding Data

Covert Channels Hiding in Transmission
Take advantage of timing or shared storage to pass data through unsuspected channel

EXAMPLE: IP datagram Header Redundancy

Known Maximum Transfer Unit (MTU)
A datagram (IP) is encapsulated into frame (header, datagram, trailer). MTU is the max total size of this datagram. To make IP independent of physical network, MTU = 65,535 bytes to give it more efficiency. If the physical layer doesnt support that MTU, the datagram must be fragmented

Methods Of Hiding Data (cont)

EXAMPLE: Continued Flags: 3 bits
1st bit: reserved (always 0) 2nd bit: Do not fragment (DF): if 1, cant be fragmented. If it is too large to pass through any available physical network, it is discarded 3rd bit: More fragment (MF): if 1, the datagram is not the last fragment of the original datagram, if 0, it is last one or there is only 1 fragment (the original datagram)

Methods Of Hiding Data (cont)

EXAMPLE TCP/IP Continued
An un-fragmented datagram has all 0s in the flag fields Redundancy condition: the DF bit can be 1 or 0 if no fragment From network perspective: Datagram 1 is not allowed to fragment (1 bit), datagram 2 is allowed but does not because it is under the maximum MTU size.

Methods Of Hiding Data (cont)

To human eyes, data usually contains known forms, like images, e-mail, sounds, and text. Most Internet data naturally includes gratuitous headers, too. These are media exploited using new controversial logical encodings: steganography and marking. Steganography: The art of storing information in such a way that the existence of the information is hidden.

Methods Of Hiding Data (cont)

To human eyes, data usually contains known forms, like images, e-mail, sounds, and text. Most Internet data naturally includes gratuitous headers, too. These are media exploited using new controversial logical encodings: steganography and marking. The duck flies at midnight. Tame uncle Sam
Simple but effective when done well

Methods Of Hiding Data (cont)

Watermarking: Hiding data within data
Information can be hidden in almost any file format. File formats with more room for compression are best
Image files (JPEG, GIF) Sound files (MP3, WAV) Video files (MPG, AVI)

The hidden information may be encrypted, but not necessarily Numerous software applications will do this for you: Many are freely available online

Methods Of Hiding Data (cont)

Hard Drive/File System manipulation
Slack Space is the space between the logical end and the physical end of file and is called the file slack. The logical end of a file comes before the physical end of the cluster in which it is stored. The remaining bytes in the cluster are remnants of previous files or directories stored in that cluster.
Slack space can be accessed and written to directly using a hex editor. This does not add any used space information to the drive

Partition waste space is the rest of the unused track which the boot sector is stored on usually 10s, possibly 100s of sectors skipped
After the boot sector, the rest of the track is left empty

Methods Of Hiding Data (cont)

Hard Drive/File System manipulation cont
Hidden drive space is non-partitioned space inbetween partitions
The File Allocation Table (FAT) is modified to remove any reference to the non-partitioned space The address of the sectors must be known in order to read/write information to them

Bad sectors occur when the OS attempts to read info from a sector unsuccessfully. After a (specified) # of unsuccessful tries, it copies (if possible) the information to another sector and marks (flags) the sector as bad so it is not read from/written to again
users can control the flagging of bad sectors Flagged sectors can be read to /written from with direct reads and writes using a hex editor

Methods Of Hiding Data (cont)

Hard Drive/File System manipulation cont
Extra Tracks: most hard disks have more than the rated # of tracks to make up for flaws in manufacturing (to keep from being thrown away because failure to meet minimum #).
Usually not required or used, but with direct (hex editor) reads and writes, they can be used to hide/read data

Change file names and extensions i.e. rename a .doc file to a .dll file

Methods Of Hiding Data (cont)

Other Methods
Manipulating HTTP requests by changing (unconstrained) order of elements
The order of elements can be preset as a 1 or 0 bit No public software is available for use yet, but the government uses this method for its agents who wish to transfer sensitive information online Undetectable because there is no standard for the order of elements and it is, in essence, just normal web browsing

Encryption: The problem with this is that existence of data is not hidden, instead it draws attention to itself.
With strong enough encryption, it doesnt matter if its existence is known

Methods Of Detecting/Recovering Data

Steganalysis - the art of detecting and decoding hidden data
Hiding information within electronic media requires alterations of the media properties that may introduce some form of degradation or unusual characteristics The pattern of degradation or the unusual characteristic of a specific type of steganography method is called a signature Steganalysis software can be trained to look for a signature

Methods Of Detecting/Recovering Data (cont)

Steganalysis Methods - Detection
Human Observation
Opening a text document in a common word processor may show appended spaces and invisible characters Images and sound/video clips can be viewed or listened to and distortions may be found
Generally, this only occurs if the amount of data hidden inside the media is too large to be successfully hidden within the media (15% rule)

Software analysis
Even small amounts of processing can filter out echoes and shadow noise within an audio file to search for hidden information If the original media file is available, hash values can easily detect modifications

Methods Of Detecting/Recovering Data (cont)

Steganalysis Methods Detection cont...
Disk analysis utilities can search the hard drive for hidden tracks/sectors/data RAM slack is the space from the end of the file to the end of the containing sector. Before a sector is written to disk, it is stored in a buffer somewhere in RAM. If the buffer is only partially filled with information before being committed to disk, remnants from the end of the buffer will be written to disk. In this way, information that was never "saved" can be found in RAM slack on disk. Firewall/Routing filters can be applied to search for hidden or invalid data in IP datagram headers

Methods Of Detecting/Recovering Data (cont)

Steganalysis Methods Detection cont...
Statistical Analysis
Most steganographic algorithms that work on images assume that the Least Significant Bit (LSB) is random If a filter is applied to an image, the LSB bits will produce a recognizable image, so the assumption is wrong After inserting hidden information into an image, the LSB is no longer non-random (especially with encrypted data). If you apply the same filter, it will no longer produce a recognizable image Statistical analysis of the LSB will tell you if the LSB bits are random or not Can be applied to audio files as well (using LSB)

Frequency scanning
Software can search for high, inaudible frequencies

Methods Of Detecting/Recovering Data (cont)

Steganalysis Methods Recovery
Recovery of watermarked data is extremely hard
Currently, there are very few methods to recover hidden, encrypted data.

Data hidden on disk is much easier to find. Once found, if unencrypted, it is already recovered Deleted data can be reconstructed (even on hard drives that have been magnetically wiped) Check swap files for passwords and encryption keys which are stored in the clear (unencrypted) Software Tools
Scan for and reconstruct deleted data Break encryption Destroy hidden information (overwrite)