Digital Forensics with Damien

On Friday 28th March I uploaded the Beta Code for SQBite to Spyder Forensics Github. This version was a major update from the Alpha code that I released earlier this year, with new features and a completely different output format which is a lot easier to work. Note: In the initial release there were a few bugs that were identified which I fixed in beta 2, a few more in Beta 3 and another in Beta 4. Just a reminder: The purpose of this tool is not to reinvent the wheel for forensics on SQLite databases, but to be used for validation, and as an educational tool for  my Advanced Applied Database Forensics class that I teach at Spyder Forensics (My employer). There is a lot more information about the records that is output than you would typically see in your main forensic tools. For example, the first 7 columns for a record in the output is not the record content but information about the record and where it is physically located. The latest version of the tool can be downloaded fro...

In this installment of the Duck Hunters Guide I am going to talk about the artifacts associated with Bookmarks and Favorites in the Android version of the DuckDuckGo web browser. Favorite sites are bookmarks that user has favorited. The favicon for a favorited site will show on a tile on a new browser tab to enable quick navigation to the URL. The main artifact for Bookmarks and Favorites is the app.db sqlite database. app.db location:  data\data\com.duckduckgo.mobile.android\databases\ This database has a lot of tables, including tables called bookmarks, bookmark folders and favorites. One would think that these tables would contain all the information about Bookmarks and Favorites; however, they are empty.  In actual fact the Bookmark and Favorite information goes into the entities table and the relations table. Entities Table The entities table contains the core information for Bookmarks and Folders. entityId - Type 4 UUID (Random) unique identifier title - Title for the Bo...

In my last Duck Hunters Guide post I discussed forensic artifacts associated with Tabs that are open in the Android DuckDuckGo Browser, now I will move onto residual artifacts that are left behind when the user closes a tab or clears their tab data. I will be talking about the same artifacts as previously so if you haven't read my previous post here it is:  The Duck Hunters Guide - Blog #3 - DuckDuckGo Open Tab Information (Android)  Tab information! As I have determined already, browser Tab information goes into the Tabs and Tab_selection tables in the app.db SQLite database. When a user closes a tab, the associated information is deleted from the table. If I query the Tabs table, I currently have 3 open tabs. app.db location: data\data\com.duckduckgo.mobile.android\databases\ Query location:   Android - DuckDuckGo Open Tabs.sql As this is an SQLite database, there are options for us to potentially recover closed tab information. The app.db utilizes a Rollback Journal i...

Recently on one of the list-serves I'm on; a question was raised about whether ID's can be reused in an SQLite database. Whilst the database in question does not reuse ID's, it does bring up the question of does SQLite ever reuse ID's? The short answer is under certain circumstances  YES they can! and the long answer requires an understanding of how rowid's work in SQLite, so let's get into that. ROWID's Explained For faster sorting and searching, SQLite implemented a special field called rowid that uniquely identifies a record in a table. This unique identifier is considered the true primary key and is what is actually used by the underlying B-tree storage mechanism to look up records in a table. The only exception to this is what they call a WITHOUT ROWID table, which uses the declared primary key as the identifier. When a table has an integer primary key declared, then this field becomes an alias of the rowid, so both fields will contain the same value. ...