Book Image

Practical Windows Forensics

Book Image

Practical Windows Forensics

Overview of this book

Over the last few years, the wave of the cybercrime has risen rapidly. We have witnessed many major attacks on the governmental, military, financial, and media sectors. Tracking all these attacks and crimes requires a deep understanding of operating system operations, how to extract evident data from digital evidence, and the best usage of the digital forensic tools and techniques. Regardless of your level of experience in the field of information security in general, this book will fully introduce you to digital forensics. It will provide you with the knowledge needed to assemble different types of evidence effectively, and walk you through the various stages of the analysis process. We start by discussing the principles of the digital forensics process and move on to show you the approaches that are used to conduct analysis. We will then study various tools to perform live analysis, and go through different techniques to analyze volatile and non-volatile data.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Practical Windows Forensics
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Parsing registry files


Suppose that you have a corrupted registry file, or you need to recover some data, or you want to verify the results of a new analysis tool. All these reasons, besides your need to know how the analysis tools work to parse and recover registry files, make it important to understand the registry file structure.

The registry file consists of blocks with the same concept of clusters in the filesystem. The block size is 4Kb. The hive expands in the whole block, again like the clusters in the filesystem. The first cluster is called the base block.

The base block

The base block is the first 4KB of the hive file. It contains the following:

  • The hive signature, which identifies this file as a hive file.

  • A timestamp of the last write operation on this hive.

  • Checksum.

  • The hive format, which differs from one OS version to another. There are differences in how data treated in different versions.

  • The real name of the hive file and its full path in the system.

  • The offset to the root cell...