Autopsy User Documentation  4.9.1
Graphical digital forensics platform for The Sleuth Kit and other tools.
UI Layout


Overview

The major areas in the Autopsy User Interface (UI) are:

You can customize how data is shown in the UI through the View Options panel.

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Tree Viewer

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The tree on the left-hand side is where you can browse the files in the image and find saved results from automated procedures (ingest). The tree has five main areas:

You can also use the "Group by data source" option available through the View Options to move the views, results, and tags subtrees under their corresponding data sources. This can be helpful on very large cases to reduce the size of each node.

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Data Sources

The Data Sources section shows each data source that has been added to the case, in order added (top one is first). Right clicking on the various nodes in the Data Sources section of the tree will allow you to get more options for each data source and its contents.

Unallocated space is chunks of the file system that is currently not being used for anything. Unallocated space can store deleted files and other interesting artifacts. On the actual image, Unallocated space is stored in blocks with distinct locations on the system. However, because of the way various carving tools work, it is more ideal to feed them a single, large unallocated file. Autopsy provides access to both methods of looking at unallocated space.

An example of the single file extraction option is shown below.

extracting-unallocated-space.PNG

Views

Views filter all the files in the case by some external property of the file, not by any internal analysis of the file.

Results

Reports

Reports can be added by Ingest Modules or created using the Reporting tool.




Result Viewer

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The Result Viewer windows are in the upper right area of the interface and display the results from selecting something in the tree. You will have the option to display the results in a variety of formats.

Right Click Functions

Viewers in Result Viewers have certain right-click functions built-in into them that can be accessed when a node a certain type is selected (a file, directory or a result). Here are some examples that you may see:

Thumbnail Result Viewers

Thumbnail Results Viewer displays the data catalog as a table of thumbnail images in adjustable sizes. This viewer only supports picture files (Currently, only supports JPG, GIF, and PNG formats). Click the Thumbnail tab to select this view. Note that for a large number of images in a directory selected in the Data Explorer, or for a View selected that contains a large number of images, it might take a while to populate this view for the first time before the images are cached.

Example
Below is an example of "Thumbnail Results Viewer" window:

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Table Result Viewers

Table Results Viewer (Directory Listing) displays the data catalog as a table with some details (properties) of each file. The properties that it shows are: name, time (modified, changed, accessed, and created), size, flags (directory and meta), mode, user ID, group ID, metadata address, attribute address, and type (directory and meta). Click the Table Viewer tab to select this view.

The Results Viewer can be also activated for saved results and it can show a high level results grouped, or a results at a file level, depending on which node on the Directory Tree is selected to populate the Table Results Viewer.

Example
Below is an example of a "Table Results Viewer" window:

table-result-viewer-tab.PNG




Content Viewer

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The Content Viewer area is in the lower right area of the interface. This area is used to view a specific file in a variety of formats. There are different tabs for different viewers. Not all tabs support all file types, so only some of them will be enabled. To display data in this area, a file must be selected from the Result Viewer window.

The Content Viewer area is part of a plug-in framework. You can install modules that will add more viewer types. This section describes the viewers that come by default with Autopsy.

Result Content Viewer

Content Viewer shows the artifacts (saved results) associated with the item selected in the Result Viewer.

Example Below is an example of "Result Content Viewer" window:

result-viewer-example-1.PNG

Hex Content Viewer

Hex Content Viewer shows you the raw and exact contents of a file. In this Hex Content Viewer, the data of the file is represented as hexadecimal values grouped in 2 groups of 8 bytes, followed by one group of 16 ASCII characters which are derived from each pair of hex values (each byte). Non-printable ASCII characters and characters that would take more than one character space are typically represented by a dot (".") in the following ASCII field.

Example
Below is an example of "Hex Content Viewer" window:

hex-content-viewer-tab.PNG

Media Content Viewer

The Media Content Viewer will show a picture or video file. Video files can be played and paused. The size of the picture or video will be reduced to fit into the screen. If you want more complex analysis of the media, then you must export the file.

If you select an non-picture file or an unsupported picture format on the "Result Viewers", this tab will be disabled.

Example
Here's one of the example of the "Media Content Viewer":

picture-content-viewer-tab.PNG

String Content Viewer

The String Content Viewer scans (potentially binary) data of the file / folder and searches it for data that could be text. When appropriate data is found, the String Content Viewer shows data strings extracted from binary, decoded, and interpreted as UTF8/16 for the selected script/language.

Note that this is different from the Text Content Viewer, which displays the text for a file that is stored in the keyword search index. The results may be the same or they could be different, depending how the data is interpreted by the indexer.

Example
Below is an example of "String Content Viewer" window:

string-content-viewer-tab.PNG

Text Content Viewer

Text Content Viewer uses the keyword search index that may have been populated during Image Ingest. If a file has text stored in the index, then this tab will be enabled and it will be displayed to the user if a file or a result associated with a file is selected.

This tab may have more text on it than the "String View", which relies on searching the file for text-looking data. Some files, like PDF, will not have text-looking data at the byte-level, but the keyword indexing process knows how to interpret a PDF file and produce text. For the files the indexer knows about, there may be the METADATA section at the end of the displayed extracted text. If an indexed document contains any metadata (such as creation date, author, etc), it will be displayed there. Note that, unlike the "String View", the Text View does not have its built-in settings for the script/language to use for extracted strings. This is because the script/language is used at indexing time, and that setting is associated with the Keyword Search indexer, not the viewer.

If this tab is not enabled, then either the file has no text or you did not enable Keyword Search as an ingest module. Note that this viewer is also used to display highlighted keyword hits when operated in the "Search Matches" mode, selected on the right-hand side of the viewer's toolbar.

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Keyword Search

Keyword Search allows the user to search for keywords in the data source. It is covered in more detail here: Keyword Search Module


Status Area

The Status area will show progress bars while ingest is occuring. This visually indicates to the user what portion of the processing is already complete. The user can click on the progress bars to see further detail or to cancel ingest jobs.


Copyright © 2012-2018 Basis Technology. Generated on Tue Dec 18 2018
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