Autopilot?

A recent post on Forensic Focus got me thinking. Basically, someone asked if there was another tool like Harlan Carvey's RegRipper that could be used to validate their findings. After talking with Harlan at some length about this, we pretty much came to the same conclusion that there are a lot of folks out there who are stuck in the old school, running on auto pilot.

Let's get something straight from the get go here, I am totally for output validation when and where necessary. Since certain tools do things in certain ways, it may be important to use another tool that comes to that same result in a different way to validate that the first tool is not doing something jankity.

Case in point was the gig I had in which I was asked to determine if some office documents had been tampered with. Some tools use metadata to display chronological information while others use the OLE data. Some tools can extract chronological data without having to mount the image, others require the image to be mounted. The point here is that the tools do things in a slightly different way.

RegRipper parses registry hives. There was a funny post where a chap stated that RegRipper is not a registry viewer, so you can't mount the hives and have a "look around". While this is a true statement, I thought it was indicative of the "old school" of forensics. What are you going to look around for? Are you going to perform "Registry Analysis" with NO IDEA what you are looking for, why, or which keys do what? This is where the term "Auto Pilot" comes in. So many folks simply have blind reliance on their tools to do the work for them. They have no idea what the tool does, how it does it, and where the output in generated from. They just load, fire, and report...this tool did this...how many other tools can I get to do the same thing? Maybe by using 17 tools to take an MD5 hash, people will think I am really smart and KNOW that my MD5 hash is a good and proper MD5 hash!

What I am getting at here is that you should have a basic understanding of what the tools you are using actually do, and how they actually do that thing. I am no coder, so I could not pull apart regripper and tell you which lines to what, but I CAN read. Harlan has done a great job with documenting how regripper works and even allows you to write your own plugins! If you took about 30 mins and reviewed the documentation, you would know that regripper simply parses the data from the registry hives in a readable format. It takes the more complex keys (like those that are Rot13'd) and translates them into plain english. That's it...no smoke, no mirrors, no voodoo magic. If you want to validate your findings, get a hex editor and do it by hand.

There are a couple of takeaways here. First, understand your tools. Have at least a basic understanding of what they do and how they do it. Then you can make an educated decision if you need another tool to validate your findings. Second, don't be on auto pilot. Don't simply run a tool and then state in your report that 'Tool BLAH showed me BLAH." Instead, state what you are looking for, why you are looking for it, and THEN state what the findings were.

Remember YOU are the subject matter expert. Your case findings should be repeatable if another investigator took the same data and used the same tools. If you document your goals clearly, and the steps you took which brought you to your conclusions, you should never have a need to defend your tools.