Forensic Analysis of the exFAT artefacts
This work addresses the need for accurate forensic analysis in exFAT, which is crucial for digital forensics practitioners, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing exFAT features.
The paper tackles the problem of forensic analysis of the exFAT file system by proposing a new methodology that uses bitmap file analysis to improve interpretation of inactive entries and recover metadata for carved files, resulting in improved forensic interpretation accuracy.
Although keeping some basic concepts inherited from FAT32, the exFAT file system introduces many differences, such as the new mapping scheme of directory entries. The combination of exFAT mapping scheme with the allocation of bitmap files and the use of FAT leads to new forensic possibilities. The recovery of deleted files, including fragmented ones and carving becomes more accurate compared with former forensic processes. Nowadays, the accurate and sound forensic analysis is more than ever needed, as there is a high risk of erroneous interpretation. Indeed, most of the related work in the literature on exFAT structure and forensics, is mainly based on reverse engineering research, and only few of them cover the forensic interpretation. In this paper, we propose a new methodology using of exFAT file systems features to improve the interpretation of inactive entries by using bitmap file analysis and recover the file system metadata information for carved files. Experimental results show how our approach improves the forensic interpretation accuracy.