A New NTFS Anti-Forensic Technique for NTFS Index Entry

Abstract

This work provides new forensic techinque to a hide message on a directory index in Windows NTFS file system. Behavior characteristics of B-tree, which is apoted to manage an index entry, is utilized for hiding message in slack space of an index record. For hidden message not to be exposured, we use a disguised file in order not to be left in a file name attribute of a MFT entry. To understand of key idea of the proposed technique, we describe B-tree indexing method and the proposed of this work. We show the proposed technique is practical for anti-forensic usage with a real message hiding case using a developed software tool.