Ryan Benson

Web Browsers

Deciphering Browser Hieroglyphics: LocalStorage (Part 2)

The second post in "Deciphering Browser Hieroglyphics" discusses LocalStorage and using CyberChef to decode it.

Open Source Tools

Hindsight v2.4 Adds JSONL Output

Hindsight v2.4.0 add JSONL output, support for the newest versions of Chrome (1-76), and other small fixes.

Web Browsers

Deciphering Browser Hieroglyphics: Intro (Part 1)

In this first post in "Deciphering Browser Hieroglyphics" I introduce Chromotopia and our artifact deciphering approach.

Open Source Tools

Solving Magnet Forensics CTF with Plaso, Timesketch, and Colab

The folks at Magnet Forensics had a digital forensics-themed Capture the Flag competition and I wanted to take a crack at it using the open source tools we use/build here at Google: Plaso, Timesketch, and Colab/Python.

Web Browsers

A First Look at Chromium-Based Edge

A quick (forensic) look at the new Chromium-based Edge web browser. TL;DR: it looks a lot like Chrome.

Open Source Tools

Hindsight v2.3 Finds and Parses Multiple Chrome Profiles

Hindsight v2.3.0 adds input path searching, parsing of LocalStorage LevelDB files, support for newer versions of Chrome (1-73), and minor fixes.

Web Browsers

Chrome Values Lookup Tables

I've fielded a few questions recently about what some value buried in a Chrome artifact means. I find myself going to the Hindsight source on GitHub and drilling down into the code because I know I have the values translated there. That seems kind of inefficient, so to

Chrome

Capturing Chrome's Evolution

When I was pretty fresh in the field of digital forensics, I picked this new thing called Google Chrome to dig into. There weren't a lot of tools out there that could parse it and I thought learning about browser history would be a useful skill for me.

Tools

Chrome Evolution

Show One Level Show Two Levels Show All Version: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

Digital Forensics

New Year, New dfir.blog

2019 is here and the new year brings something with it I've wanted to do for a while: re-launch my blog! It has a new look and a new home at dfir.blog. I've had some big changes in my life: I became a father and

Tools

Hindsight

Hindsight is a free tool for analyzing web artifacts. It started with the browsing history of the Google Chrome web browser and has expanded to support other Chromium-based applications - with more to come! Hindsight can parse a number of different types of web artifacts, including URLs, download history, cache

Presentations & Interviews

Video of "Efficiently Summarizing Web Browsing Activity" at SANS DFIR Summit 2018

I spoke at the SANS DFIR Summit 2018 on "Efficiently Summarizing Web Browsing Activity" in Austin, TX. My abstract was: Reviewing web browsing activity is relevant in a wide variety of DFIR cases. With many users having multiple devices that may need to be analyzed, we need better

Presentations & Interviews

Ryan Benson Interviewed by BBC Click about Web Browsers

I was interviewed by BBC Click for their "What is GDPR?" episode. I'm not really sure what the personal information web browsers are storing on your computer has to do with the GDPR, but hey, I got to talk about browser forensics on TV so that

Open Source Tools

Hindsight v2.2 Parses More Chrome Preference Items

Hindsight v2.2.0 adds parsing of more preference items and support for newer versions of Chrome. The quick version is: * Support for Chrome versions 1 - 66 * Preference items with timestamps now are in the Timeline * Improvements to logging Both the GUI and command line versions of this release

Presentations & Interviews

Deciphering Browser Hieroglyphics

I spoke about "Deciphering Browser Hieroglyphics" at the SANS DFIR Summit 2017 in Austin, TX. I talked about how to "decipher" different kinds of information stored in web browsers, using a variety of open source tools. A recording of most of the talk is available YouTube

Visualizations

Visualizing Activity from Metadata

Encrypted iPhone backup? That means it's useless to an investigator (or attacker), right? Not so fast. We can still get an incredible amount of insight into the actions on the devices from the metadata alone. I am currently taking Sarah Edward's FOR518: Mac Forensic Analysis from

Open Source Tools

Hindsight v2 Adds a Web UI and Cache Parsing

Hindsight v2 is here! The new release brings new features, many of which are focused on ease-of-use, along with a refactoring of the code into a Python package pyhindsight. The highlights are: * Cross-platform web UI * Easier installation on all OSes - now just do pip install pyhindsight * Ability to parse

Web Browsers

Investigating Universal Analytics

Two common questions when investigating web browsing are: (1) how long did a user spend on a website, and (2) what actions did they take while on it? We have a number of methods of approximating what the user did and how much time they spent on a page, but

Web Browsers

Load Balancer Cookie Decoder

I was going through my bookmarks and found a write-up from a few years ago on decoding NetScaler load balancer cookies. Adam Maxwell (@catalyst256) wrote a few blog posts describing his process of figuring out how to decode the cookie and finished it off by releasing a Python script that

Open Source Tools

Alexa, Tell Me Your Secrets

The Amazon Echo is a nifty little device that you communicate with via speech - you can ask it to do various tasks and it verbally replies. You preface each command with the trigger word - either "Alexa", "Amazon", or "Echo". The Echo uses

Web Browsers

It's a "Brave" New World... or is it?

Brave is a new browser from some experienced people that aims to be faster and safer than other browsers by blocking ads and trackers. Brave also wants to disrupt the current online model where users pay for services with their privacy. The About page on Brave's website describes

Presentations & Interviews

Video of "Customized Google Chrome Forensics with Python" at SANS DFIR Summit 2015

I spoke at the SANS DFIR Summit 2015 on "Customized Google Chrome Forensics with Python" in Austin, TX. My presentation introduced Hindsight, an open source tool (written in Python) for extracting, interpreting, and reporting on Google Chrome artifacts. I went over how to use Hindsight to analyze a

Visualizations

Finding the First Thread with a Visualization

Finding the first thread to pull to get an investigation started can sometimes be difficult. Having a checklist and a structured approach to your investigation can help quite a bit. Experience also can help you come up with a list of artifacts to review and places to check, but what

Open Source Tools

Upgrading Python's SQLite

SQLite and Python in DFIR SQLite databases are being used in more and more applications, and thus forensic examiners are increasingly running across them in investigations.  Python seems to be one of the languages of choice for the DFIR community, and so SQLite and Python often intersect.  I've

Open Source Tools

Hindsight v1.5.0 released + GUI!

I am very excited to announce that Hindsight v1.5.0 is here! Graphical User Interface The core Hindsight functionality continues to see incremental improvements, along with quite a few internal changes to support new features that will appear in subsequent releases. However, the major change is that there is