Book Image

Digital Forensics with Kali Linux - Second Edition

By : Shiva V. N. Parasram
Book Image

Digital Forensics with Kali Linux - Second Edition

By: Shiva V. N. Parasram

Overview of this book

Kali Linux is a Linux-based distribution that's widely used for penetration testing and digital forensics. It has a wide range of tools to help for digital forensics investigations and incident response mechanisms. This updated second edition of Digital Forensics with Kali Linux covers the latest version of Kali Linux and The Sleuth Kit. You'll get to grips with modern techniques for analysis, extraction, and reporting using advanced tools such as FTK Imager, hex editor, and Axiom. Updated to cover digital forensics basics and advancements in the world of modern forensics, this book will also delve into the domain of operating systems. Progressing through the chapters, you'll explore various formats for file storage, including secret hiding places unseen by the end user or even the operating system. The book will also show you how to create forensic images of data and maintain integrity using hashing tools. Finally, you'll cover advanced topics such as autopsies and acquiring investigation data from networks, operating system memory, and quantum cryptography. By the end of this book, you'll have gained hands-on experience of implementing all the pillars of digital forensics: acquisition, extraction, analysis, and presentation, all using Kali Linux tools.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1: Kali Linux – Not Just for Penetration Testing
4
Section 2: Forensic Fundamentals and Best Practices
7
Section 3: Forensic Tools in Kali Linux
12
Section 4: Automated Digital Forensic Suites
16
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Maintaining evidence integrity

In order to provide proof that the evidence was not tampered with, a hash of the evidence should be provided before and during, or after, an acquisition.

In Kali Linux, we can use the md5sum command, followed by the path of the device, to create an MD5 hash of the evidence/input file – for example, md5sum /dev/sdx.

You may also try the command with superuser privileges by typing in sudo md5sum /dev/sdx.

For this example, the 2 GB flash drive that I'll be using (named test_usb) is recognized as sdb and the command I will be using is shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 5.3 – Creating an MD5 hash using md5sum

In the previous example, the output of the md5sum command of the 2 GB flash drive is displayed as 9f038....1c7d3 /dev/sdb. When performing the acquisition or forensic imaging of the drive using dc3dd, we should also have that exact result when hashing the created image file output to ensure...