XP Anti-Forensics

There is discussion now and again in computer forensic circles regarding "anti-forensics", techniques that are used on systems to remove or obfuscate the artifacts that an examiner may look for and analyze. These are usually discussed in the context of purposeful actions performed by a user or attacker, but not so much in the sense that there are "under the hood", "behind the scenes" activities that go on as part of normal, day-to-day operations of the operating system that can serve the same function.

What is it that happens behind the scenes on a live XP system that most of us don't really know about? Have you ever fired up FileMon or RegMon and just watched what they recorded on a live system, without you interacting with the system at all? Now...move the mouse pointer across the screen...

While XP is a treasure trove of artifacts for an examiner, there are also things that the examiner needs to keep in mind when performing artifact extraction and analysis, particularly when it comes to looking for deleted files. When a file is deleted on a Windows system (not moved to the Recycle Bin, but really deleted), it's common knowledge that its not really gone. In a nutshell, the sectors that the file occupies are still on the hard drive, although they are now available for use by the operating system. And there's a lot that XP does to use those available sectors.

Many applications, such as MS Word, like to create temporary files while you're editing a document, and then delete those when you close the document. The sectors used by those temporary files need to come from somwhere. Yes, this is an application-specific issue and applies to any version of Windows that the application is running on.

XP creates System Restore Points, every 24 hrs by default, but also during various other actions, such as software installation or removal, etc. These Restore Points contain files that consume sectors. See my book for more information on Restore Point analysis.

Every three days, the XP Prefetch function performs a limited defragmentation of files on the hard drive. While this is limited, it still moves the contents of some sectors, overwriting others.

Speaking of XP Prefetch, when a user (any user) on the system launches a "new" application, a Prefetch file may be created for that application (assuming the 128 Prefetch file limit hasn't been reached). On my system, I have 104 .pf files, ranging in size from 8K to over 100K. Again, sectors are consumed.

As discussed in the Registry Analysis chapter of my book, there are a number of places within the Registry where a user's actions are recorded in some manner. New entries are added to the Registry, increasing the size of the files...not just the user's NTUSER.DAT file, but some actions will added entries to the HKLM hives, as well.

Of course, there are also a number of Registry settings that will have an effect on the examiner's analysis; these are addressed in detail in my book. While these aren't specific to XP, they do have a decidedly anti-forensic effect.

I mention these things because many times an examiner may be looking for evidence of a deleted file, carving unallocated space looking for a keyword or a file header, and come up empty. Remember Harlan's Corollary? ;-) Funny how there just seem to be more and more ways to apply that corollary...

Sites discussing anti-forensics aren't hard to find:
The MetaSploit AntiForensics Site
Ed Skoudis is quoted on antiforensics in 2003
Marcus K. Rogers' presentation
Ryan Harris' DFRWS paper