Friday, April 16, 2010

Additional Thoughts on Kindle Forensics

We're in an exciting time in digital forensics. It seems like each week we have a sharp digital forensic researcher discovering some new method or creating a new tool for us. We have seen incredible advances in traditional hard drive forensics and we have the wonderful and relatively new world of mobile device forensics to explore.

I've been doing digital forensics many years now and one of the things I've noticed about digital forensics people is that we sometimes tend to engage in catastrophic thinking when it comes to advances in technology and the future of digital forensics. We've all seen the various predictions that hard drive sizes, thin clients, encryption and other advances would spell the end for digital forensics. In fact, these advances show that our skills will become more in demand. However, we will have to constantly keep our edge sharp or we will fall behind. There will always be some sort of digital technology that will require a digital forensics practitioner to examine. Digital forensics will no more fade way than will technology or law, but it will be a constantly changing field.

The Kindle is a great example of how technological advances will provide examiners new opportunities for their examinations, but why examiners need to invest a considerable amount of time keeping their technological edge. The Kindle isn't a computer and it's not a cell phone, but it has qualities of both.

I recently received an Amazon gift certificate from a friend of mine. Amazon can distribute their gift certificates through email. In this case, the gift certificate was sent to my email address and included a code that I could enter into my Amazon profile to credit my account for the proper amount. Of course, I used that amount to purchase several books for my Kindle.

The Kindle book store can be accessed by the Kindle itself through the device's 3G network connection. There isn't any need to connect the device to a computer to download purchased content like you would for something like iTunes. You merely access the Kindle store via your Kindle device and you can purchase your books using your Amazon account. Another option is that you can log onto the Kindle bookstore on a computer using the Amazon website. You can then shop for Kindle books, purchase them through the website and have the content delivered to your Kindle via the wireless network. This is what I did with my gift certificate and after I had made my purchase, I picked up my Kindle and the books were on my device.

Great stuff for the consumer, but something that a forensic examiner would need to be very aware of when dealing with the Kindle as evidence. The last thing you want is to have a Kindle sitting in your evidence room waiting to be examined and to have additional content land on the machine and potentially overwrite existing evidence.

My advice is to treat the Kindle like you would any other mobile device examination up to and including using a shielded environment where the device can't phone home. A good research project for someone would be to determine whether or not it's safe to keep the device outside of a shielded environment if the 3G network is disabled by the examiner.


Tuesday, April 13, 2010

A Cursory Look at Kindle Forensics

I recently purchased a Kindle which I have come to adore. It's one of those devices make it hard imagine what life was like before you purchased it. However, being the hopeless forensic geek that I am, I had to figure out what sort of forensics could be performed on the device. (No, I have no idea how I got someone to marry me. I really don't.)

I purchased the current generation Kindle with the 6" screen. This model provides the user the ability to plug the device into a computer via a USB port to interact with the device. Amazon accomplishes this ability by creating a 1.5GB portion of the device that is visible and accessible to the user as if it were a standard USB storage device.

From the research that I have conducted so far, it appears that you can treat the Kindle as you would any other USB storage device for imaging purposes. The best way to do it is to use the USB cable that Amazon provides for connecting the Kindle to a computer. You can then write block a Kindle like you would any USB device. For my research, I used a Tableau T8 USB Forensic Bridge and was able to make the image using EnCase without any problems.

I haven't spent much time on the analysis portion of this research. However, I can report that a Kindle USB Drive shows up as an mkdosfs\FAT32 situation. This makes sense given that the Kindle runs some sort of Linux OS that we can't see via this USB capture process.

There are some interesting artifacts of the low hanging fruit variety. For example, "userannotlog" file located in the system folder. It lists the last book that I read, what my position was in the book and it also includes clear text time stamp information that correlates with when I know I was reading the book in question. Very cool.

The "documents" folder, as you might expect, contains the actual content that I have on my Kindle. I don't have much on it right now, but each book has an .azw file which is the actual content of the book in a proprietary format and a .mdp file that...well, I don't know what it does at this point.

There is a "search indexes" folder in the system\search indexes folder path that, one assumes, keeps track of searching done on the device. I bought a wine book that I did a search for the word "Pinotage" (Sigh. Yes, add "wine geek" to my list of vices...) and I used that as a keyword for a search...and came up with nothing eventful. There were about 20 hits on the word, but all of them in the context of other words in that alphabetical range so nothing that would show that I searched for that word.

You'll find a lot of indexed words in the system\search indexes\Index.db What I'm seeing already is that there are three bytes before each word that are clearly meaningful. For example, the word "pinewood" is preceded by 0x740008. So what we have is the word "pinetorch" and then 0x740008 and then the word "Pinewood". I don't know what the 0x74 means or if it's associated with the word "pinetorch" or "pinewood", but the 0x08 is the length of the pinewood entry. It's probable that this length indicator actually uses two bytes which would make 0x0008 the bytes that indicate length. I'm seeing this behavior consistently in this index file where a word is preceded by byte(s) whose hex value correlates with the length of the word that comes after the byte(s). Interestingly, I'll see a block of words pretty close together and then one word will end with 0x7A instead of 0x74 and then there won't be anymore words until a new block starts again about 900 or so bytes later. Towards the end of this file, there is a listing of the books on the Kindle and the paths to their associated files.

There is also a reader preferences file in the system\com.amazon.ebook.booklet.reader\reader.pref location. It has a clear text time stamp that appears to correlate with the last time I used the Kindle. It also declares what preferences I'm using for a dictionary, the type of justification I'm using and the last book I read.

There's a white paper in here for someone somewhere.