Forensic signature for tracking storage devices: Analysis of UEFI firmware image, disk signature and windows artifacts

Abstract

Tracking storage devices is one of the important fields in digital forensics. The existing methods and tools about registry, event log or IconCache analysis help solving cases on confidential leakage, illegal copying, and security incident cases. However, previous approach has drawback in tracking storage devices such as HDD, SSD, and etc since it was based on the good performance of USB device tracking. Another drawback in previous approach is that it is vulnerable to anti-forensics because the artifacts are dependent on the operating system. This paper introduces a new definition of forensic signature for tracking various storage devices and reviews the known artifacts. Furthermore, this study introduces unidentified artifact stored in UEFI firmware image and independent of operating system. Moreover, this paper develops a methodology for tracking storage devices using forensic signature according to the storage type. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.