Using FragMend to Solve the 2006 DFRWS Forensics Challenge


Author(s) Glenn Henderson and David Horvath and Jeff Jones and Florian Buchholz
TR-Number JMU-INFOSEC-TR-2006-004
Abstract The purpose of the 2006 Digital Forensics Research Workshop File Carving Forensic Challenge was to recover files from raw file system data. All file system information had been removed from the data file and all that was left were the file data itself. To solve the challenge we developed FragMend, a GUI tool that classifies sectors of the raw data and allows an investigator to group them together interactively into files. Files can then be tested to a certain degree within the GUI. Using FragMend and a small number of supporting scripts, we were able to recover 32 files from the raw challenge data: 3 text files, 6 HTML files, 3 PK Zip files, 14 JPG files, and 6 Office documents (5 Word and 1 Excel). No sectors with well-known file headers remained in the list of remaining unallocated sectors. FragMend is open-source, licensed under the BSD Open Source License and is available for download at Sourceforge
Sponsor Prof. Florian Buchholz
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