Test Results for Digital Data Acquisition Tool: EnCase 6.5

• NCJ Number: 228226
• Date Published: September 2009
• Length: 122 pages
• Grant Number(s): 2003-IJ-R-029
• Agencies: NIJ
• Publication Type: Test/Measurement

Annotation

Test results are presented on the Guidance Software, EnCase, version 6.5, a digital data acquisition tool, under the Computer Forensics Tool Testing (CFTT) program.

Abstract

Except for four test cases, the EnCase acquired all visible and hidden sectors completely and accurately from the test media without any anomalies. The following six anomalies were observed: 1) if a logical acquisition is made of an NTFS partition, a small number of sectors, seven in the executed test, appear in the image file twice, replacing seven other sectors that fail to be acquired; 2) if a logical acquisition is made of an NTFS partition, the last physical sector of the partition is not acquired; 3) if the tool attempts to acquire a defective sector with an error granularity greater than one sector, some readable sectors near the defective sector are replaced by zeros in the created image file; 4) HPA and DCO hidden sectors can be acquired completely if FastBlock SE is used as a write blocker during an acquisition; 5) for some partition types when imaged as a logical acquisition, if a logical restore is performed there may be a small number of differences in file system metadata between the image file and the restored partition; and 6) for some removable USB devices that have been physically acquired, there may be a small number of differences in file system metadata between the image file and the restored device. The CFTT program, a joint project of the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology's, Office of Law Enforcement Standards and Information Technology Laboratory seeks to provide measurable assurance to practitioners, researchers, and other applicable users that the tools used in computer forensics investigations provide accurate results. This document reports the results from testing EnCase, version 6.5, against the Digital Data Acquisition Tool Assertions and Test Plan Version 1.0. Figures