I noticed from Anton's blog that the DFRWS 2007 papers were posted and available. I agree with Anton, a couple of the presentations are interesting. I was aware of Andreas's work with the Vista Event Log format, and transforming them into plain text...cool stuff.

Rich Murhpey had a paper entitled Automated Windows event log forensics, which I thought was interesting. In his paper, Rich points to "repairing" Event Log files that have been corrupted, using the method made available by Capt. Stephen Bunting. I can't say that I agree fully with this, as the Event Log files can be easily parsed directly from their binary format. Rich provides the beginnings of this in his paper, and more detailed information is available in my book. Rich also goes into extracting event records from unallocated space using Scalpel, but the file header he uses specifically targets the header and not event records in general (again, check out Windows Forensic Analysis for details on this). Extracting event records (and other objects that contain timestamp information, such as Registry keys) from unallocated space, the pagefile, or a RAM dump takes a bit more work, but it's definitely an achievable goal. Knowing the structure of these objects, we can locate the "magic number", perform some checking to ensure that we indeed have found a valid object, and then extract the information. Oh...wait...that's how the brute force EProcess parsing tools work on RAM dumps! ;-)

For those interested in time synchronization, check out A brief study of time...no, Stephen Hawking did not present this year - though, how cool would that be?! Not only is he one of the greatest minds of our time, but he's been portrayed on The Simpsons, and he's appeared in a quite funny excerpt from Star Trek:TNG! A complete set of media appearances can be seen here. For a brainiac, king-of-all-nerds kind of guy, he really rocks!

Going back to Rich's paper, the theme of DFRWS 2007 was "file carving", and the forensic challenge seems to have gone off fairly well. If you're at all interested in some of the cutting edge research in file carving, take a look at the challenge and results.