A Tool for Mac OS X Operating System and Application Forensics
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digital investigation 5 (2008) S83–S90 available at www.sciencedirect.com journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/diin MEGA: A tool for Mac OS X operating system and application forensics Robert A. Joyce*, Judson Powers, Frank Adelstein ATC-NY, 33 Thornwood Dr. Suite 500, Ithaca, NY 14850, United States abstract Keywords: Computer forensic tools for Apple Mac hardware have traditionally focused on low-level Mac OS X file system details. Mac OS X and common applications on the Mac platform provide an Computer forensics abundance of information about the user’s activities in configuration files, caches, and Spotlight logs. We are developing MEGA, an extensible tool suite for the analysis of files on Mac Disk image analysis OS X disk images. MEGA provides simple access to Spotlight metadata maintained by the Application analysis operating system, yielding efficient file content search and exposing metadata such as dig- ital camera make and model. It can also help investigators to assess FileVault encrypted home directories. MEGA support tools are under development to interpret files written by common Mac OS applications such as Safari, Mail, and iTunes. ª 2008 Digital Forensic Research Workshop. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Boot Camp software or in a virtual machine such as Parallels or VMware Fusion. The increasing popularity of Apple Macintosh hardware, par- With the assistance of the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), ticularly that using Intel x86-compatible processors, provides we are developing an extensible Macintosh Evidence Gather- new challenges and data-gathering opportunities for forensic ing and Analysis (MEGA) tool suite that allows investigators examiners. Various estimates of Mac market share hover to graphically assess and collect data on dual-boot Mac sys- between 5 and 14%, and that number is growing quarter by tems, and to gather and analyze forensically relevant data quarter (AppleInsider, 2008). The New York State Computer specific to Mac OS X and common applications on the Crime Unit sees approximately 5–10% Macs, almost exclu- platform. sively Mac OS X, in their investigations. Some niche markets Section 2 describes existing forensic research and tools have even greater penetration; Princeton University reports available for Mac OS X. Section 3 summarizes the design and that 45% of new computer purchases on campus in 2006 implementation approach taken for MEGA. The Mac ‘‘Spot- were Macs (Daily Princetonian, 2006). light’’ search index, maintained by Mac OS X 10.4 and later, Yet forensics on Mac OS X-based systems is an immature can dramatically speed investigators’ search for particular field with relatively few tools available. Those tools that do ex- files; the acquisition and forensic implications of this meta- ist focus mainly on low-level file system analysis and provide data are discussed in Section 4. In addition to Spotlight little interpretation of the files or insight into user activities (at queries, MEGA can also handle FileVault encrypted home least not without substantial effort by the investigator). The directories, which are discussed in Section 5. Finally, Section complexity of Mac-based investigations is compounded by 6 describes other features of MEGA that are currently under the fact modern Macs often run multiple operating systems development, as well as future directions for Mac OS X foren- (such as Microsoft Windows), either dual-boot via Apple’s sic research. * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (R.A. Joyce), [email protected] (J. Powers), [email protected] (F. Adelstein). 1742-2876/$ – see front matter ª 2008 Digital Forensic Research Workshop. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.diin.2008.05.011 S84 digital investigation 5 (2008) S83–S90 2. Related work Existing forensic tools with explicit support for Mac OS X are few, and typically focus on low-level file system forensics. Guidance Software’s EnCase, AccessData’s FTK, and some versions of the open source Sleuth Kit can read Apple HFSþ- formatted disk images; EnCase can also perform a limited snapshot of live OS X machines. BlackBag’s Mac Forensics Software and subrosasoft’s MacForensicsLab also focus on file-based data recovery and extraction of files of evidentiary value (BlackBag Technologies Inc.; Subrosasoft’s MacForensic- sLab). Cyber Security Technologies’s live forensic tool, OnLi- neDFS, supports Mac OS X but does not take advantage of Fig. 1 – Analysis of a dual-boot Mac OS system with Mac-specific forensic data (OnLineDFS). In addition, with OS Windows virtual machines. X’s Unix underpinnings, Unix-based tools and scripts allow an expert examiner to gather generic information about files and processes. None of the existing tools addresses dual-boot Windows/OS reproducible manner, including fully documenting the inves- X machines, made possible with Apple’s Boot Camp software, tigative process with its own audit log. It can also produce RTF, nor do they handle the increasingly popular Windows/Linux PDF, or HTML formatted reports of the data gathered, along virtual machines under OS X on Intel, such as Parallels and with investigators’ notes. VMware Fusion. Further, no existing tool addresses the new, The initial ‘‘triage’’ mode in MEGA allows an investigator to forensically critical data available in OS X: Spotlight searches quickly assess the operating system(s) installed on a Mac OS X and caches, Safari web browser information, encrypted home disk image or machine – both bootable partitions and virtual ma- directories, iPods associated with a machine, and so on. chine images within the file systems. This information allows Recent research, such as that of Kubasiak (2007, 2008) and the forensic examiner to quickly pinpoint the disk partitions MAC OS, has explored the forensic implications of data writ- most likely of interest and to apply operating system-specific ten by the Mac OS X operating system and common applica- tools to those partitions. Fig. 2 shows an example of the triage re- tions. Much more data of forensic relevance is documented sults for a machine with two Windows virtual machines. in reference materials by Apple Computer Inc. (2006) and Once triage is complete, MEGA employs command-line Singh (2006). Recent work has also shown that dictionary at- analysis tools on files automatically extracted from the disk tacks are effective in decrypting user directories encrypted image, then presents the results graphically. MEGA is with Apple’s FileVault feature (Appelbaum and Weinmann, designed to be extensible, allowing new analysis tools to be 2006). Finally, the limited existing research on iPod forensics created and added dynamically (e.g., to extract ‘‘recent indicates that details of the machine ‘‘associated’’ with an addresses’’ from a new type of e-mail client). iPod are maintained on the iPod itself, in addition to any ad- Machine-wide, MEGA can make use of Spotlight indexes dress book entries or calendar items automatically synced written by the operating system; this feature is described in by iTunes (Marsico and Rogers, 2005; Slay and Przibilla, Section 4. MEGA can also detect and analyze user home 2007). This data could prove a vital link between a music directories encrypted using the Mac OS X FileVault feature, player found on the scene and a computer used at home. as will be discussed in Section 5. 3. Approach 4. Spotlight file metadata MEGA extracts and analyzes OS X-specific forensic informa- Spotlight is the metadata indexing system introduced in Mac tion from a seized disk image, as shown in Fig. 1. (MEGA could OS X 10.4. At the highest level, Spotlight is responsible for ac- also operate in a ‘‘live’’ forensics setting – executing directly quiring, storing, indexing, and performing searches on file on the running machine to be analyzed – but our initial atten- metadata (Apple Computer Inc., 2007a). By default, the Spot- tion is on after-the-fact analysis.) With a focus on interpreting light indexer runs continuously in the background, tracking and analyzing files written by the operating system and com- modified files and updating the metadata index in real-time. mon OS X applications, MEGA will provide insight into user ac- For investigators, Spotlight metadata should be treated as tivities that is not possible – or is substantially more tedious to advisory only, used in conjunction with other search technol- obtain – with low-level disk image tools. ogies; the absence of a file from the Spotlight index is not ex- MEGA uses the open source Sleuth Kit tools to extract par- culpatory evidence. Yet the Spotlight index is invaluable in tition information and files, allowing MEGA to read dd (raw), speeding searches for files based on sophisticated content or EnCase, and FTK format disk images (Carrier). Most of MEGA’s metadata criteria. extraction and analysis work is performed by executing com- Spotlight encapsulates two other capabilities: searching for mand-line tools – both The Sleuth Kit and our own custom files based on file system metadata, such as filename, size, and tools. MEGA performs its tasks in a forensically sound, modification date; and indexing and searching the content of digital investigation 5 (2008) S83–S90 S85 Fig. 2 – Example of MEGA triage results with a single-boot machine containing two virtual machines. text-based files, a feature formerly available through Search file content formats by default, including Microsoft Word files, Kit in OS X 10.3. The behavior of these two capabilities differs Apple Pages and Keynote documents, common image for- slightly from the behavior of other Spotlight metadata, despite mats, and e-mail mailbox files from a number of client pro- being integrated into Spotlight. grams. Other file types can be supported for forensic When a file is created or modified, it is processed by the ap- analysis if the database is rebuilt, as will be discussed in propriate metadata importer, which generates metadata from Section 4.2.1.) the file.