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https://github.com/williballenthin/INDXParse

Tool suite for inspecting NTFS artifacts.
https://github.com/williballenthin/INDXParse

Last synced: 25 days ago
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Tool suite for inspecting NTFS artifacts.

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README 

        
INDXParse

===============



Introduction

------------

INDX files are features of the Windows NTFS file system. They can 

be thought of as nodes in a B+ tree, where each directory has an 

INDX file. The INDX files contain records for each file within a 

directory. Records contain at least the following information:



 - Filename

 - Physical size of file

 - Logical size of file

 - Modified timestamp

 - Accessed timestamp

 - Changed timestamp

 - Created timestamp



INDX files are interesting to forensic investigators for a number 

of reasons. First, an investigator may use INDX files as a source 

of timestamps to develop a timeline of activity. Secondly, these 

files have significant slack spaces. With careful parsing, an 

investigator may recover old or deleted records from within these

data chunks. In other words, the investigator may be able to show 

a file existed even if it has been deleted.



INDX files are not usually accessible from within the Windows 

operating system. Forensic utilties such as the FTK Imager may 

allow a user to extract the file by accessing the raw hard disk. 

FTK names the INDX file "$I30". Tools like the Sleuthkit can 

extract the directory entries from a forensic image. INDXParse 

will not work against a live system.



Previous work & tools

---------------------

I'd like to first mention John McCash, who mentioned he was 

unaware of any non-EnCase tools that parse INDX files in a SANS 

blog post. That got my mental gears turning.



I started out with a document called NTFS Forensics: A 

Programmers View of Raw Filesystem Data Extraction by Jason 

Medeiros. Unfortunately, while this document describes parsing 

INDX files in detail, a number of steps in the explanation were 

wrong.



The second resource I used, and used extensively, was Forensic 

computing by A. J. Sammes, Tony Sammes, and Brian Jenkinson. I 

found the relevent section was available for free via Google 

books. This was an excellent document, and I now plan on buying 

the full book.



42 LLC provides the INDX Extractor Enpack as a compiled EnScript 

for EnCase. This was not useful to me, because I was unable to 

get to the logic of the script.



The Sleuthkit has INDX structures defined in the tsk_ntfs.h 

header files. I didn't do much digging in the code to see if 

TSK does any parsing of the INDX files (I suspect it does), 

but I did use it to verify the file structure.



Usage

-----

INDXParse.py accepts a number of command line parameters and 

switches that determine what data is parsed and output format. 

INDXParse.py currently supports both CSV (default) and 

Bodyfile (v3) output formats. The CSV schema is as follows:



  - Filename

  - Physical size of file

  - Logical size of file

  - Modified timestamp

  - Accessed timestamp

  - Changed timestamp

  - Created timestamp



INDXParse.py will parse INDX structure slack space if provided 

the '-d' flag. Entries identified in the slack space will be 

tagged with a string of the form "(slack at ###)" where ### is 

the hex offset to the slack entry. Note that slack entries will 

have separate timestamps from the live entries, and could be 

used to show the state of the system at a point in time.



If the program encounters an error while parsing the filename, 

the filename field will contain a best guess, and the comment 

"(error decoding filename)". If the program encounters an error 

while parsing timestamps, a timestamp corresponding to the UNIX 

epoch will be printed instead.



The full command line help is included here:



INDX $ python INDXParse.py -h

usage: INDXParse.py [-h] [-c | -b] [-d] filename



Parse NTFS INDX files.



positional arguments:

  filename    Input INDX file path



optional arguments:

  -h, --help  show this help message and exit

  -c          Output CSV

  -b          Output Bodyfile

  -d          Find entries in slack space



INDXTemplate.bt is a template file for the useful 010 Editor.

Use it as you would any other template by applying it to INDX files.



TODO

----

  - Brainstorm more features ;-)



License

-------

INDXParse is released under the Apache 2.0 license.



Contributors

------------



  - Jerome Leseinne for identifying a bug in the is_valid constraint and null blocks