One question, which is very prominent in forensics is, “When?”
In other words, time is a very important factor at which analytics is based in the process of forensics. There are many artifacts that we use in an investigation which have temporal characteristics. These characteristics allow us to build the whole picture of an incident. Moreover, timeline analysis could help when we analyze different types of evidence. Timeline analysis may be built on the base of any source that has timestamps. This could be the metadata of the filesystem, registry, event log files, log files of applications, memory, network traffic, and so on.
Certainly, the timeline is one of the most useful techniques that is applied in digital forensics. However, this is based on the analysis of particular artifacts, so it is very important to understand how to analyze the artifacts that are suppliers of timeline events. Despite the apparent simplicity of the idea underlying the timeline, in practice, it is not so easy. One of the difficulties is the large amount of data that has to be analyzed. The issue with a running system is that there are a few users and many system services, which produce a lot of events. We need to filter out such activities from normal users. The idea of a timeline is not very new. It has been around since the year 2000, when Rob Lee and some other forensic people started applying it in digital forensics. Originally, filesystems served as a source of data for the timeline. We will consider the NTFS filesystem as the most prevalent filesystem in our review.
The timeline of the NTFS filesystem is based on the timestamps in some attributes of the filesystem objects.
Every object of the filesystem has the following timestamps:
⦁ M: This is the date of data modification
⦁ A: This is the date of data access
⦁ C: This is the date of metadata change
⦁ B: This is the date of metadata creation
Based on the analysis of this data, we can determinate when a file was created, copied, moved, and so on. The NTFS filesystem uses FILETIME as its time format in UTC. UTC is Coordinated Universal Time. FILETIME contains a 64-bit value representing the number of 100-nanosecond intervals since January 1, 1601 (UTC). MS Windows also uses other time formats. They are the UNIX time format, DOS Date format, and SYSTEMTIME format.
