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A Cyber Forensics Framework

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A Cyber Forensics Framework International Journal of Scientific and Research Publications, Volume 6, Issue 1, January 2016 374 ISSN 2250-3153 Design and Development of CLI for SleuthKit: A Cyber Forensics Framework Dilpreet Singh Bajwa*, Gurpal Singh Chhabra ** * Department, Institute Name ** Department, Institute Name, if any Abstract- There are many cyber forensic tools available for state and National law enforcement agencies. Right kind of tool extraction, making copy of original media and for analysis. Tools is in your hand to create a best sculpture, similarly right kind of are inherent part of any cyber forensic investigation and they tools are required to properly investigate the case. The must be based on proven methodology and techniques admissible authenticity and reliability of the gathered evidences rely to great under legal procedure. extent on the used forensic tools. If used tools are not reliable, The Sleuth Kit (TSK) is a popular open source cyber the result produced by these tools will not be considered reliable forensic tool constitutes a library and collection of command line [2]. tools that allow user to investigate disk images. These command In the present work, a CLI for sleuthkit which is a open line tools are difficult to use and the user have to use each one source cyber forensic tool is created and automate the process. only independently. Output is also not saved for future reference Some other tools for hash calculation are also incorporated in the and analysis. system to make it more efficient. Guidance and help is provided In this work, a common command line user interface is while we are executing these command line tools further output created for command line tools of sleuth kit and automates the just not shown on screen, in addition it saves in a file for further process. Some other tools for hash calculation are also analysis. Secondly whole session and steps followed by user as incorporated in the system to make it more efficient. cyber forensic expert is also saved. Figure: 1.1 given below helps to understand the idea. Index Terms- Cyber Forensics, Digital Forensics, Computer Forensics, Cyber Forensics Tools, Sleuthkit, Open source Cyber Forensic tool. I. INTRODUCTION ue to integration of computer and communication D technology and the fast development of digital technology have made significant changes to computer world. Firstly, the Figure: 1.1: Higher Level Model of CUI for Sleuthkit effectively and efficiently processing capability of computer made it most important tool for data processing. With the new So, the interface created provides easy execution of technology storage capacity is also increased day by day. As a command line tools, automate the process provide flexibility to result, more and more data is processed and stored in computer add new tools other than TSK. systems. Secondly, the internet influence is so much in our daily This paper is organized in to seven sections: First section life from simple email communication to banking transactions, provides introduction and background information, second online shopping, surfing, social networking etc. With this section discuss, is it fine to use open source tool instead of increase in computer and internet usage, the crime related to commercial tools. In Third section problem statement is given. computers is also increased gradually. To counter these criminal Fourth section provides proposed Design. Fifth section discusses activities and also to prove crime in court of law, a new field: implementation, Sixth section show working and experimental “Cyber Forensics” came in to existence which incorporates results and in Seventh section conclusion and future scope is procedure, tools and techniques to find the evidence against given. cyber criminals and prove it in court of law. Cyber forensics is defined as “The use of scientifically derived and proven methods toward the preservation, collection, II. OPEN SOURCE VS PROPRIETARY TOOLS validation, identification, analysis, interpretation, documentation In cyber forensics investigation Interpretation, analysis and and presentation of digital evidence derived from digital sources documentation are important steps to find the evidence and to for the purpose of facilitating or furthering the reconstruction of prove it in court of law. For analysis of digital devices several events found to be criminal, or helping to anticipate unauthorized commercial and open source forensic tools are available. actions shown to be disruptive to planned operations [1]”. Commercial tools are software products provided by different For cyber forensic investigation cyber forensic tools are organizations. Law enforcement agencies are using these tools now used on a daily basis by examiners and analysts within local, for cyber forensics. Education institutes which running course in www.ijsrp.org International Journal of Scientific and Research Publications, Volume 6, Issue 1, January 2016 375 ISSN 2250-3153 cyber forensics also use these proprietary tools. These • icat: Extracts the data units of a file, which is specified commercial tools are very expensive and can be purchased on by its meta data address (instead of the file name). license for particular duration. After expiry you again have to • ifind: Finds the meta data structure that has a given file renew the license. They are easy to use and proper name pointing to it or the meta data structure that points documentation and support is available for these commercial to a given data unit. tools usage. On the other hand open source cyber forensic tools • ils: Lists the meta data structures and their contents in a are also available which also equally efficient [3] but the pipe delimited format. disadvantage of using an open source tools is lack of support and • istat: Displays the statistics and details about a given proper documentation. It is also finding difficult to use these meta data structure in an easy to read format. tools. First, most Open Source Solutions (OSS) framework were • blkcat: Extracts the contents of a given data unit. adopted from system utilities such as disk backup, file system • blkls: Lists the details about data units and can extract detection and system check that were not designed for computer the unallocated space of the file system. forensics usage. Second. Investigator must have high-level • blkstat: Displays the statistics about a given data unit in information about computer architecture which posed serious an easy to read format. risk for novice or intermediate level investigator. Third, no GUI • blkcalc: Calculates where data in the unallocated space and, output provided by open source tools is text based and image (from blkls) exists in the original image. This is usually very hard to understand. Fourth in many cases, an expert used when evidence is found in unallocated space. has to use more than one tool to obtain evidence [4]. • jcat: Display the contents of a specific journal block. But there are several benefits attached in using open source • cyber forensic tools: You don’t have to purchase them, No jls: List the entries in the file system journal. license fee is required, and you can use them anywhere i.e. • mmls: Displays the layout of a disk, including the outside the licensed lab, for students, educationist and the unallocated spaces. organizations who don’t afford commercial tools, the open • mmstat: Display details about a volume system source tools are the best choice. In [4], author states that despite (typically only the type). the availability of commercial computer forensics software, most • mmcat: Extracts the contents of a specific volume to computer forensics investigators prefer to use the freely available STDOUT. open source solutions (OSS) due to various reasons: OSS freely • img_stat: tool will show the details of the image format available, OSS can be used to perform preliminary acquisition • img_cat: This tool will show the raw contents of an Information gathering while most commercials can only do post image file. acquisition information gathering. Further the code is available • hfind: Uses a binary sort algorithm to lookup hashes in for these open source forensic tools, you can optimize and the NIST NSRL, Hashkeeper, and custom hash modify them according to your requirement, you can also databases created by md5sum. understand the internal working and code and how results are • mactime: Takes input from the fls and ils tools to create produced which is not possible with commercial tools. You a timeline of file activity. authenticate them in court of law. Most of these Open Source • sorter: Sorts files based on their file type and performs tools in no way are less reliable and effective, when compared extension checking and hash database lookups. with the proprietary suits [3]. Open source software continues to • sigfind: Searches for a binary value at a given offset. be one of the most widely used tools in computer forensics [5]. Useful for recovering lost data structures. In the scenario to learn, to experiment, to understand internal working and code, open source cyber forensic tools are These tools perform some specific function and we can the best bet. Open source tools with proper combination also execute them independently only. We can also use many provide all features provide by any commercial tool. arguments with these command line tools which make their function more specific. So sleuthkit contains rich set of these command line tools which are used for disk analysis. III. PROBLEM STATEMENT The file system tools are used to examine file systems of a As it is clear from above discussion that open source tools suspect computer. It works on both Windows and UNIX provide a good alternative for computer forensics. The Sleuthkit platform. The volume system (media management) tools are used (TSK) is open source cyber forensic software and constitutes a C to examine the layout of disks and other media. With these tools, library and collection of command line tools for file and volume you can identify where partitions are located and extract them so system forensic analysis [6] that they can be analyzed with file system analysis tools.
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