By William Ballenthin & Jeff Hamm
Our
post in the Incident Response with NTFS INDX Buffers series
detailed the internal structures of the NTFS filename attribute. In
this post, we'll use a tool to parse the active contents of INDX
records and carve for inactive information out of the slack space.
NTFS indices track the contents of a directory by using the filename
attribute structure. This includes file name, MACb times, and file
sizes. This is the third post in a four part series that
includes:
Once you find
an INDX record of interest, you can use it as a timeline artifact.
In the example we present today, we will look for executable files
in a particular path. If we do a logical listing of this path, we
will not see any executable files - as either allocated or deleted.
Figure 1 is a file listing from FTK Imager. If there were deleted
files with active $MFT records, the files would be listed using FTK
Imager or other forensic tools.
If we look at
the hexadecimal dump of an INDX attribute, we can see the Unicode
string "RC255~1.EXE". This looks like a Windows 8.3 short
filename. Based on the file extension, this is probably an
executable file. This INDX record suggests that an executable file
used to reside in the directory of interest. Continuing the cursory
glance, we also note a filename that indicates a Microsoft Word
document in the INDX attribute content. Figure 1 displays a partial
hexadecimal dump of the INDX attribute. INDX attributes seem to
contain data that may help us to reconstruct the previous contents
of a directory.
INDXParse.py
INDXParse.py is an open source Python
script written by Willi Ballenthin that parses INDX attributes into
a human readable format. You can download it from the
repository (
The script can extract file names, MACb file timestamps, and file
sizes from INDX records. INDXParse.py produces output in either a
CSV or
format (
You can use this tool to extract file information from slack space
in an INDX attribute as well. This means we can partially
reconstruct the old contents of a directory. We will detail the INDX
attribute slack space in Part 4 when we explain the structure of an
INDX buffer in detail. Figure 3 lists the INDXParse.py options and
usage.
Using the techniques we described in the first part of
this series, we used FTK Imager to extract the INDX allocation
attribute for the directory we were examining. Using INDXParse.py,
we can recover timeline information and indicators for the file
"RC255~1.EXE". Figure 4 displays the command we used to
print the output to our console. We used the "-c" option
to send the output to a CSV format, and we used the "-d"
option to find entries in slack space.
For
sorting, we redirected the output to a CSV file by using the command
"python INDXParse.py -c -d $I30 > Figure 5 lists the output in a spreadsheet
INDX.csv".
table. From the output we can see that the file
"RC255~1.EXE" was created on September 28, 2012 at
12:41:48 UTC and was 139,264 bytes in size. In total, INDXParse.py
identified two active files in the directory and evidence of at
least three deleted files in the directory.
Because a
directory INDX is a b-tree structure, it sorts data as records are
added or removed. This can result in the INDX containing more than
one entry for the same file. For example, the "WORD~1.DOC"
file is listed twice in Figure 6. This is the result of
reorganization of the folder by NTFS over time.
Conclusion
Using the tool INDXParse.py, we can extract
information not available to us from traditional file listing
methods. We were able to establish in our example the existence of
the file "RC255~1.EXE" when a file listing with other
forensic tools had failed. In our final post, we'll revisit the hex
dump from our INDX and detail the internal structures of the NTFS
INDX attribute.