Daily Blog #37: Web 2.0 Forensics Part 2

Web 2.0 Forensics Part 2 by David Cowen - Hacking Exposed Computer Forensics Blog

Hello Reader,
             Sunday Funday is always fun for me for two reasons. One it gets me two blog posts out of one so I get more time to get work done and two I like getting a general feeling of what level of understanding exists on certain artifacts. 

So while you get a prize, that I strive to make worth your effort, I get to see what I can continue to help you learn by writing additional blog posts to fill those gaps. With that said we are continuing the web 2.0 series today that I realized was needed from the IEF Sunday Funday challenge two weeks ago.

Json Data Structures

Json data structures are fairly easy to find, they are structure name pairs that are exchanged between the web server and the web client, for instance the Gmail server and the Chrome browser. In this example the Chrome browser would then parse the data to generate the view that you see.

Here is what a message summary from your Gmail inbox looks like:

Index data for gmail
["140303866b4ce541","140303866b4ce541","140303866b4ce541",1,0,["^all","^i","^o","^smartlabel_notification"]
,[]

Email from/subject/message preview and date
,"\u003cspan class\u003d\"yP\" email\u003d\"mail-noreply@google.com\" name\u003d\"Gmail Team\"\u003eGmail Team\u003c/span\u003e","\u0026raquo;\u0026nbsp;","Welcome to the new Gmail inbox","Hi David Meet the new inbox Inbox tabs put you back in control with simple organization so that you",0,"","","10:35 am","Tue, Jul 30, 2013 at 10:35 AM",1375198584460000,,[]
,,0,[]
,,[]
,,"3",[0]
,,"mail-noreply@google.com",,,,0,0]
  
This is followed by the  body of the message.In addition on each page you have a listing of all the labels, email counts, circles and more data that is preloaded to each page providing you with a large amount of data on your custodians activities but also providing for a large amount of duplicates.

Tomorrow we will go into the important fields and their meanings and I'll provide a regex for carving them out. Recovering webmail used to be simple, just find a javascript library known to the service and carve out the html before and after it, now with JSON/Ajax services like Gmail we get fragments of emails and possibly entire messages but we either have to manually carve them or use a tool like IEF to do it for us.

I start with IEF and let find the fully formed messages and then go back myself to find partials knowing the users email address.

See you tomorrow! Leave comments or questions below if your seeing data differently. I'm going to install fiddler on my system tonight to show how the data looks as its being transmitted.

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