Windows
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Windows is a widely-spread operating system from Microsoft.
There are 2 main branches of Windows:
- the DOS-branch: i.e. Windows 95, 98, ME
- the NT-branch: i.e. Windows NT 4, XP, Vista
Contents
- 1 Features
- 2 Forensics
- 3 Advanced Format (4KB Sector) Hard Drives
- 4 %SystemRoot%
- 5 See Also
- 6 External Links
Features
- Basic and Dynamic Disks, see: [1]
Introduced in Windows NT
Introduced in Windows 2000
Introduced in Windows XP
- Prefetch
- System Restore (Restore Points); also present in Windows ME
SP2
- Windows Firewall
Introduced in Windows 2003 (Server)
- Volume Shadow Copies
Introduced in Windows Vista
- BitLocker
- Search integrated in operating system
- ReadyBoost
- SuperFetch
- Transactional NTFS (TxF)
- Transactional Registry (TxR)
- Shadow Volumes; the volume-based storage of the Volume Shadow Copy data
- $Recycle.Bin
- Windows XML Event Log (EVTX)
- User Account Control (UAC)
Introduced in Windows 2008 (Server)
Introduced in Windows 7
Introduced in Windows 8
- File History
- Storage Spaces
- Resilient File System (ReFS); Was initially available in the Windows 8 server edition.
Introduced in Windows Server 2012
Forensics
Partition layout
Default partition layout, first partition starts:
- at sector 63 in Windows 2000, XP, 2003
- at sector 2048 in Windows Vista, 2008, 7
Filesystems
Recycle Bin
RECYCLER
Used by Windows 2000, XP. Uses INFO2 file.
See: [2]
$RECYCLE.BIN
Used by Windows Vista. Uses $I and $R files.
See: [3]
Registry
The Windows Registry is a database of keys and values that provides a wealth of information to forensic investigators.
Thumbs.db Files
Thumbs.db files can be found on many Windows systems. They contain thumbnails of images or documents and can be of great value for the investigator.
See also: Vista thumbcache.
Browser Cache
Browser History
The Web Browser History files can contain significant information. The default web browser that comes with Windows is Microsoft Internet Explorer but other common browsers on Windows are Apple Safari, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Opera.
Search
Setup log files (setupapi.log)
Windows Vista introduced several setup log files [4].
Sleep/Hibernation
After (at least) Windows 7 recovers from sleep/hibernation there often is a system time change event (event id 1) in the event logs.
Users
Windows stores a users Security identifiers (SIDs) under the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList
The %SID%\ProfileImagePath value should also contain the username.
Windows Error Reporting (WER)
As of Vista, for User Access Control (UAC) elevated applications WER reports can be found in:
C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\WER\
As of Vista, for non-UAC elevated applications (LUA) WER reports can be found in:
C:\Users\%UserName%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\WER\
Corresponding registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Error Reporting
Advanced Format (4KB Sector) Hard Drives
Windows XP does not natively handle drives that use the new standard of 4KB sectors. For information on this, see Advanced Format.
%SystemRoot%
The actual value of %SystemRoot% is store in the following registry value:
Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ Value: SystemRoot
See Also
External Links
- Wikipedia: Microsoft Windows
- Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, and Windows Vista setup log file locations
- The Forensic Analysis of the Microsoft Windows Vista Recycle Bin, by Mitchell Machor, 2008
- Microsoft Windows File System Tunneling, by Eric Huber, February 24, 2013
- Spotting the Adversary with Windows Event Log Monitoring, by National Security Agency/Central Security Service, February 28, 2013
Malware/Rootkits
- Inside Windows Rootkits, by Chad Tilbury, September 4, 2013
Tracking removable media
- Tracking USB First insertion in Event logs, by Yogesh Khatri, August 18, 2012
Under the hood
- MSDN: Comparing Memory Allocation Methods, by Microsoft
- How Windows Starts Up (Part the second)
- DLL/COM Redirection
- Dynamic-Link Library Search Order
- Image File Execution Options
MSI
- Changes to Package Caching in Windows Installer 5.0, by Heath Stewart, February 2, 2009
- MSI: The Case Of The Invalid Signature, by Didier Stevens, July 26, 2013
Side-by-side (WinSxS)
- Wikipedia: Side-by-side assembly
- Assembly Searching Sequence
- RT_MANIFEST resource, and ISOLATION_AWARE_ENABLED
- Isolated Applications and Side-by-side Assemblies
- DotLocal (.local) Dll Redirection, by Junfeng Zhang, January 24, 2006
- Diagnosing SideBySide failures, by Junfeng Zhang, April 14, 2006
- EVERYTHING YOU NEVER WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT WINSXS
Application Compatibility Database
- Technet: Understanding Shims, by Microsoft
- MSDN: Application Compatibility Database, by Microsoft
- Secrets of the Application Compatilibity Database (SDB) – Part 1, by Alex Ionescu, May 20, 2007
- Secrets of the Application Compatilibity Database (SDB) – Part 2, by Alex Ionescu, May 21, 2007
- Leveraging the Application Compatibility Cache in Forensic Investigations, by Andrew Davis, May 4, 2012
System Restore (Restore Points)
- Wikipedia: System Restore
- Restore Point Forensics, by Steve Bunting
- Restore Point Analysis, by Harlan Carvey, June 16, 2007
- Restore Point Forensics, by Harlan Carvey, October 20, 2006
- System Restore Point Log Decoding
Crash dumps
- Technet: Drwtsn32 on Windows Vista/Windows Server 2008/Windows 7/Windows Server 2008 R2, by Yong Rhee, December 29, 2010
- MSDN: How to read the small memory dump file that is created by Windows if a crash occurs, by Microsoft
