#163: X-Ways Forensics,
X-Ways Investigator, WinHex 20.0 released
Aug 18, 2020 |
This mailing is to announce the release of another update with many
notable improvements, v20.0.
WinHex evaluation version:
https://www.x-ways.net/winhex.zip
(also the correct download link for anyone with a personal or professional license
and access to updates)
Customers please go to
https://www.x-ways.net/winhex/license.html
for download links, the latest log-in data, details about their access to updates, etc.
Please do not ask us about the download password. Your organization has
access to it already if eligible. Those customers whose
access to updates or license has
expired can receive upgrade/renewal offers from the same web page.
Please be reminded that if you are interested in receiving information about
service releases when they become available, you can find those in
the
Announcement section of the
forum
and (with active access to updates) can subscribe to them, too, by creating
a forum profile. Please note that if you wish or need to stick with an older
version for a while, you should at least use the last service release of that version.
Yes, really.
Upcoming
Training
Please sign up for our training notifications
here
if you would like to be kept up to date on future classes.
What's new in v20.0?
(please note that most
changes affect X-Ways Forensics only)
File System/Disk Support
-
UFS support has been revised. Significantly more UFS
variants are now understood.
-
APFS: Supports new Catalog ID structure as created by
Mac OS Catalina.
-
Technical Details Report/evidence object properties
now show details of MacOS X Installations on HFS+ or APFS volumes: Exact
OS X version, timezone, the system's network and display names.
-
Support for much more deeply nested subdirectories in
XFS volumes.
-
Supports Ext4 volumes with version 2 of sparse
superblocks.
-
Slightly more complete output of Ext* file system
timestamps.
-
Ability to choose which copy of a FAT12/FAT16/FAT32
file allocation table to work with, in Options | Volume Snapshot. This
can be either a user-designated copy or the one that is defined as
active in the boot sector (in case of FAT32). If neither the user
selects a copy nor the boot sector defines a single copy as active, the
first copy will be used, labelled as "FAT 1", like in earlier versions.
The copy that was selected at the time when the volume snapshot was
taken will be used for the whole lifetime of that volume snapshot, even
if the settings are changed. It is displayed in the Info Pane. The
Technical Details Report now informs which copy or copies are considered
active in the file system.
-
Identifies unpartitioned physical disks or disk
images as such in some rare cases where it previously didn't.
-
General option to open volumes including the slack
that doesn't add to another cluster just like when opening an entire
partition. The data in that area, aside from a potential NTFS backup
boot sector, does not belong to that volume logically and was stored
there before the volume was created. It is not needed to parse the file
system or to mount the volume (though some tools may output an error
message if it's not included). Including such data in a volume image can
be an IT security leak if only the regularly accessible part of the
volume had been sanitized before usage.
-
Identifies some new bus types of currently attached
storage devices.
-
Active sector superimposition is now remembered in an
evidence object and automatically re-activated when the evidence object
is opened next time, and you will be reminded of that.
-
Generally improved handling of incomplete/corrupted
.e01 evidence files, similar to storage media with unreadable areas (bad
sectors). NTFS: A limited listing of system files is now presented based
on $MFTMirr if in an such an incomplete image $MFT is not included, but
$MFTMirr is.
-
Ability to abort the potentially time-consuming
preparation of a cluster allocation map for huge volumes and still
proceed with taking the actual volume snapshot if desired (without
reverse cluster allocation information).
Picture Support
-
New version of the internal picture viewing library.
-
WEBP pictures are now supported in Preview, Gallery,
and for the View command.
-
Ability to view pictures in some variants of the
DICOM format.
-
Metadata extraction from WEBP pictures revised.
Output of processing states, similar to PNG files. File type
identification/verification for DICOM and WEBP revised.
-
All JPEG files are now presented with a processing
state in Details mode. Two additional state values were introduced.
-
The processing state now depends on the detected
generator, where each generator is now assigned to one of three
generator classes D (device), E (editor), or C (content management
system). JPEG files produced by generator class D are absolute
originals. The processing state is always "original". JPEG files
produced by the generator class E are relative originals. Their
processing state is always "Edited normally". Examples are photos
published by news agencies like Reuters.
-
The detected processing state of the third generator
class (CMS like WordPress, Drupal, TYPO3, Joomla etc.) can assume
different values. They are usually irregularly edited, i.e. their edited
status is not officially indicated. The state can be deducted indirectly
based on filename, generator signature, pixel dimension. The state
"irregularly edited" can also result from picture manipulations.
-
The new processing state "scaled" means that a
picture was created with a content management system such as WordPress,
TYPO3, Drupal. It can be said with a high probability that such pictures
have been released to the public, which entails a reduced intelligence
value. Practically such pictures cannot be regarded as documents. They
were automatically and individually adapted to the respective output
display in order to optimize the loading time of the web page.
-
The state "EXIF stripped" refers to JPEG pictures,
whose device origin was detected although no EXIF metadata is present.
The device can potentially be detected based on generator signature,
filename or a characteristic pixel dimension.
-
The state "social media" is indicated separately
because such pictures often have a higher intelligence value. Unlike
news agency pictures they are rather semi-public in nature.
-
The state "minimized" is also new and indicates that
the JPEG quality was reduced or that the file size was reduced by
optimized recompression (jpeg-recompress, JPEGMini).
-
The state "undefined" means that the status cannot be
determined. It's a category for everything that remains. Such pictures
are usually also the output of content management systems, those that do
not identify themselves and whose format is not yet identified (which
may change in future versions).
-
The processing state and other values (size, bits per
pixel, filename analysis) are now also output for PNG files. The same
processing states as for JPEG are used, except "Irregularly edited" and
"EXIF stripped" are not possible. The value "Original" is used only for
screenshots, if they have passed a special test.
-
The "size" reported for JPEG pictures in Details mode
now always has 1 or 2 values. Sizes that are not standard sizes with a
common name (such as "XGA") are described as "thumbnail", "medium",
"medium large", "large" or "big" based on the terminology established by
Wordpress. If a generating device is identified, the field is named
"sensor size" instead or - in the case of scanners - "paper size".
-
Reduced false positive rate when detecting scanned
documents.
-
JPEG screenshot identification now based on
generating device recognition.
-
Improved classification of pictures based on pixel
dimensions.
-
X-Ways Forensics now knows an additional 5000+
devices to better identify the origins of JPEG pictures and other files.
The generator signature table and video signature table updated.
-
Simplified output of "Quality" in the summary table
for JPEG files. It can assume one of the values High, Medium, Low and
Very low. It is based on the lossy compression percentage of the DQT
segment.
-
Additional test in the check for camera originals
based on whether the EXIF tags are sorted or not.
-
Output of GPS coordinates with up to 6 digits after
the decimal point. This is useful because of the habit of newer Samsung
device models to specify more decimals and indirectly express the
precision of the value by that, contrary to the convention to use the
GPS Error tag for that information, unlike Apple and older Samsung
models.
-
If the GPS format encountered is "unexpected" based
on the assumed source of the JPEG file, that is brought to the user's
attention in Details mode. The GPS format will be shown as "unknown" if
it is not used in camera original pictures (for example the format of
the Geosetter application).
-
Generally improved GPS format consistency tests.
-
Some more "content created" timestamps are now
extracted from pictures, in particular from XMP metadata.
-
Output of Photoshop's "Preserved file name" in the
metadata.
File Archive Support
-
Support for split zip archives in PKZIP/WinZip and
7-Zip styles (a.k.a. spanned or segmented archives).
-
Extended timestamps from the extra field in zip
records are now extracted and presented in the timestamp columns based
on Apple specifications, which however is not always how these
timestamps are meant. An alternative interpretation can be seen for each
zip record in Details mode when selecting the zip archive. The latter
interpretation shows these timestamps with the "UT" prefix and tries to
recognize the actual format variant, for example that used in GrayKey
collections, and from GrayKey collection also extracts an additional
type of timestamp (a record change timestamp).
-
The alternative interpretation of extended timestamps
can also be made available in the directory browser. This is an option
in Options | Volume Snapshot. The alternative processing currently takes
some more time.
-
In newly refined volume snapshots, the column "1st
sector" is now populated properly for files in Zip archives with the
sector that contains the local zip record of the respective file.
Clicking a file in a zip archive now automatically jumps directly to its
local zip record, which is followed by the (usually) compressed file
data. Does not apply to files in nested zip archives.
-
Detection and avoidance of more variants of zip
bombs.
-
The alternative TAR extraction method now estimates
the size of the MBOX e-mail archive in a Google Takeout TGZ file if that
size was erroneously stored as 0, which apparently happens in real life.
Only that work-around allows to extract the MBOX e-mail archive file
from such a takeout at all, and once that has happened of course the
e-mail messages and attachments can usually be extracted from the e-mail
archive.
-
Navigation within a file archive with directories is
now possible without leaving File mode when touching a directory.
-
Archive subtypes in a section that is not selected
for automatic inclusion in the volume snapshot are now still explored
when manually double-clicked by the user.
-
Support for .ctx Chrome Extensions as file archives.
That file type is now included in the "Special interest" section of
archives in a fresh installation.
-
Improved ability to extract attachments in PDF files,
in particular in so-called PDF portfolios (user-compiled collections of
arbitrary files), with the original names and internal paths of the
attached/embedded files, where the Description column identifies these
files as attachments.
Spreadsheet Support
-
New ability of the logical Simultaneous Search to
find numbers and dates not only if stored literally as text, but also if
numbers or dates are stored in binary form in certain spreadsheet files
(e.g. in OLE2 compound file format) or in some other encoded form (e.g.
dates encoded as textual integer numbers in XML), if the "decode text"
option is on. This works pretty well with numbers in Excel and
LibreOffice Calc spreadsheets, but can be tricky occasionally with the
format of dates if the original Excel user has selected a custom date
format instead of one of the standard date formats and also because of
some specialties with certain Calc files where it's not 100% predictable
that a date will be extractable in the expected format. This kind of
search likely works with some other file types as well, e.g. older
spreadsheet types like MS Works or Lotus 123. You can try and define the
file types in Options | Viewer Programs if needed. To quickly see and
double-check the extraction of numbers and dates from a particular file
of interest, you select that file in the directory browser and switch
from ordinary to raw preview mode with the Shift key pressed. Please
feel encouraged to completely remove that new file mask there for faster
text decoding if you do not need to search for numbers and dates in
spreadsheets.
Some more details about number searches: Consider a cell in an MS Excel
spreadsheet that contains the number 1234567. You can now find that
number with the Simultaneous Search searching simply for "1234567"
(without the quotation marks). Even if you just know part of the
sequence of digits and search for "34567", you will get a search hit
(unless the "whole words only" option is on). If the cell has the
"number" format (not "general"), with digit grouping enabled, you can
optionally get the number with digit grouping when the file is
searched/indexed/decoded in that volume snapshot for the first time,
using the digit grouping symbol that is defined in X-Ways Forensics in
Options | General | Notation, but that is not generally recommended because you
would have to search for the same number both with and without the
grouping symbol if you don't know whether the original spreadsheet cells
were formatted as "number" with or without digit grouping or as
"general". Anyway, to give you another example, if you enable that
option for digit grouping in number cells in Options | Viewer Programs
and you live in an English speaking country, using a comma as the digit
grouping symbol, you would thus search for "1,234,567" to find that
number in a number cell. You can also search for just ",567" to find the
digit group "567" at the end or in the middle of any longer number in
that notation.
If the number that you are looking for is a floating point number, the
same rules apply, and you can optionally enter the number with as many
decimals as you expect to be visible in the cell in the original
application (or less), with the same decimal symbol as in your notation
settings in X-Ways Forensics (either a point or comma). If a floating
point number is stored for example as 9.876 and formatted to show 2
decimals, it will be shown rounded as 9.88 in the original application
and will also be searchable like that in X-Ways Forensics. The same
rules apply to currency amounts. You can append or prepend the currency
symbol if you know for sure that it was shown in the original
formatting, and how (e.g. with or without space between currency symbol
and number), or you just omit symbol.
You can search for dates in pure date cells using the notation that is
active in X-Ways Forensics as the so-called simple date format. If your
simple date format is MM/dd/YY, you would search for 12/31/19 to find
the date Dec 31, 2019. Partial date searches are also possible, and make
sense especially if you do not use American date styles. For example in
ISO notation "yyyy-MM-dd" you can search for "2019-07-". Or in German
notation "dd.MM.yy" you can search for ".07.19" to find any date in July
2019.
Pure time cell searches have also become possible (with partial or whole
time expressions). Just make sure to use the separator that is active in
X-Ways Forensics for the display of times. Searches for combined date
and time values are supported, however, the delimiter between date and
time that you can expect is not the delimiter defined in Options |
General | Notation, but typically a single space, or an individual delimiter
defined by the user of the spreadsheet.
If an Excel worksheet is embedded in a .docx, .pptx, or .odt file and
the volume snapshot has been sufficiently refined, the worksheet will be
processed and searched in the same way as if it was a separate file. If
embedded in a .doc file, you would get a notification in the form of a
report table association "Contains embedded document(s)", which is often
useful to check manually anyway.
The number search capabilities should prove very useful especially in
forensic accounting, tax fraud investigations etc. Please note that the
simple search function of the viewer component (Ctrl+F) in ordinary
("pretty") Preview mode or the View command cannot find numbers
or dates in spreadsheets, no matter how you type them.
-
Preview mode and the View command now use the same
digit grouping character, decimal character, date separator, time
separator and date order as active elsewhere X-Ways Forensics, to format
numbers and dates in spreadsheets.
E-mail Support
-
Alternative extraction methods are now available for
PST/OST/MBOX e-mail archives (still in a testing stage). These methods
will be used if the main extraction method fails to extract e-mails or
if preferred by the user. There is a new check box for that preference,
not labelled but tooltipped. The alternative method for PST/OST does not
work with password-protected e-mail archives and cannot find previously
existing objects.
-
When attaching a directory with external files to an
e-mail archive (PST, OST or MBOX), the contents of that directory will
be treated like the result of an e-mail extraction performed by the
viewer component. That means for example that redundant empty top-level
directories like "Top of Personal Folders", "Root - Mailbox",
"IPM_SUBTREE" will be skipped and that the MSG files will automatically
be split up into to EML files with e-mail headers and bodies plus
separate attachment files. Such an extraction can be performed with the
context menu commands "Extract Selected Files" and "Extract All Files"
in the preview or view of those e-mail archives.
-
E-mails that are extracted from PST/OST e-mail
archives and that are attached to other e-mails are now described as
extracted e-mails and attachments at the same time.
-
Support for more code pages in e-mail extraction from
MSG.
-
The alternative .eml preview option now affects PDF
representations of e-mails generated by the Recover/Copy command.
General File Format Support
-
Revised and more thorough metadata extraction from
HTML files. In particular, "Open Graph" metadata is now extracted.
-
Support for certain copy-protected PDF documents used
by X-Ways.
-
Ability to import hash values from v2.0 of Project
VIC JSON files.
-
Can now find search terms in ISO-2022 code pages
(Japanese, Korean, Chinese) that span an escape sequence in the original
data. Can now find individual characters that require escape sequences
in Korean and Chinese ISO-2022 code pages.
-
Improved conversion from/to ISO-2022 code pages.
-
UTF-16 text from the clipboard is now pasted without
the null terminator.
User Interface
-
WinHex and X-Ways Forensics now respect Windows
settings for window text and background colors. We are referring to the
settings that you were able to reach with a few mouse clicks in the
Control Panel in Windows XP, which in Windows 7 you can still find via
Personalization | Window Color | Advanced appearance settings, and which
in Windows 10 can still be edited as raw RGB value with the Registry
Editor in this key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER | Control Panel | Colors (followed
by logging in and out).
Black backgrounds for almost all parts of the user interface (main
window, data window, Case Data window, ...) in particular are now
supported in X-Ways Forensics, which can be helpful when working in an
environment with little ambient light, which generally benefits users
who think they can work longer with a less bright screen, and which in
general should reduce the disruption of melatonin production and the
circadian rhythm among people who face screens emitting unnatural light.
The viewer component already previously respected those settings for
most document types (it does not or cannot respect them for PDF files
for example).
For the most complete dark screen experience you would change your
entire Windows system to a dark theme. The easiest way to achieve that
not only for "apps", but also real desktop applications, is to activate
the black high contrast theme. In Windows 10 you would go to PC Settings
| Personalization | Settings for high contrast | Activate high contrast
| Contrast black.
-
A "forced" dark mode just within WinHex/X-Ways
Forensics is now also readily available, even without any of the above
procedures or settings, in Options | General, which you can activate
when needed for night time or generally, for health reasons or to
attract less attention during secretive work in a dark adversary
environment. It is not 100% complete, as for example it does not affect
user interface elements such as window captions, pop-up menus,
scrollbars, standard file selection windows or date selection boxes. For
those dark mode support from Windows is needed (see above).
-
Various meaningful colors in the graphical user
interface had to be adjusted in X-Ways Forensics' own dark mode or when
a black background color in Windows settings is detected and adopted,
for example the color of file types depending on the type status. In the
calendar, the grayscale coding of days with lots of activities is
inversed if the background color is black. If you discover text that is
unreadable in dark mode, please report back. Color preferences for block
selections, tag marks, "already viewed", modified bytes, and
positions/search hits highlighting are now remembered separately for
normal mode and dark mode.
-
A new option useful in conjunction with dark mode is
the ability to render pictures with the internal graphics viewing
library as well as all thumbnails in the gallery darker. If that check
box, which can be found next to the check box for dark mode in Options |
General, is half checked, that means the pixels will be darkened a
little less.
-
Some more GUI adjustments for high DPI settings.
-
The Windows username of the current user is now
logged in each section of msglog.txt, in addition to the exact program
release, which was previously logged already.
-
The command line parameter for automated
(unsupervised) imaging is now supported in X-Ways Imager just like in
X-Ways Forensics.
-
The filters for size and first sector now have a
modulo option. With that option in the Size filter you can for example
filter out files that are not a multiple of the sector size, when
looking for raw disk images or TrueCrypt/VeraCrypt container files. With
that option in the First Sector filter you can for example focus on
files that are cluster-aligned or not.
-
Settings of the Size filter, the Hash Value filter,
and the Device Type filter are now stored in .settings files and in .xfc
case files like the settings of other column-based filters.
-
The Flex filters now have the option for a logical
AND combination of all filter terms, so that for example you can filter
for e-mails that at the same time are described as attachments.
-
Improved option to filter for carved files with the
Description column.
-
The text filters for comments, metadata, and event
descriptions now have an option for case sensitivity.
X-Tension API
-
New X-Tension API function XWF_ManageSearchTerm().
-
Ability of the X-Tension API XWF_Search() function to
specify the alphabet(s) that define word boundaries.
-
XWF_OpenItem now supports a new flag to open only the
plain text of files, which X-Ways Forensics is able to extract from
various file types.
-
C++ function definitions and C++ sample projects
updated on the X-Tension API web page.
-
Fixed an error in the disk I/O X-Tension API.
Miscellaneous
-
More efficient generation of thumbnails of
non-pictures in the gallery.
-
The generation of thumbnails of non-picture files for
the report is now more consistent in the results it produces.
-
Usage of internal keyboard hooks for enhanced
keyboard shortcuts is now optional, cf. Options | Security.
-
Some improvements in stability and error handling.
-
SR-1: Fixed an exception error that could occur when
extracting embedded data from PDF documents.
-
Users who are cut off from their offices and/or have
no access to their dongles due to a regional lockdown, quarantine
measures, travel restrictions or mail service disruptions have this
option since May 2020: As long as someone else has access to your dongle
(a colleague), they can temporarily deactivate (mothball) the dongle in
v20.0, which allows you to use X-Ways Forensics with other means
instead, for the time being, at a nominal price. For details please see
www.x-ways.net/dongle_protection2.html.
-
Many minor improvements.
-
User manual and program help updated for v20.0.
Changes of further service releases of v19.9
-
SR-8: Password detection using a dictionary did not
work in certain encrypted archives. That was fixed.
-
SR-8: Big-endian interpretation of data as FILETIME
timestamps in the Data Interpreter failed when interpretation as a
big-endian floating point number was active and not successful ("NAN").
That was fixed.
-
SR-8: Fixed processing of Windows.edb and SRUDB.dat
files in v19.9.
-
SR-9: Prevented a rare exception error that could
occur when resolving symlinks.
-
SR-9: Prevented a very rare exception error that
could occur when parsing Zone.Identifier ADS.
-
SR-9: A rare error that could occur when reading XFS
directories has been fixed.
-
SR-9: Ability to process certain MBOX files with
unusual line break characters between e-mails.
-
SR-9: Fixed inability to read from files in some GZ
archives that occurred if these files were opened repeatedly and the
evidence object was not closed in between.
-
SR-9: Fixed RunCount interpretation of certain
Windows 10 Prefetch files.
-
SR-10: Fixed an internal recoding error for search
terms that could occur when the simultaneous search was run as part of
volume snapshot refinement.
-
SR-10: Prevented a crash that could occur when
extracting metadata from certain MP3 files with a corrupt ID3 tag.
-
SR-10: Under certain circumstances, logical searches
with multiple threads unnecessarily processed the same file more than
once. That was fixed.
-
SR-10: The alternative TAR extraction method no
longer omits files with a size of 0 bytes in TAR archives.
-
SR-10: X-Tension API: XWF_GetVSProp() with
XWF_VSPROP_SET_HASHTYPE1* and XWF_SetHashValue() did not work in volume
snapshots with no previous or simultaneous hash value computation. That
was fixed.
Viewer Component
-
A new download of v8.5.4 of the viewer component was
made available on July 16. Oracle
security fixes from July have been applied. The below issues were
addressed. Some of these bullet points are quoted verbatim, others have
been rephrased for better general understanding where possible.
E-mail with background color set to white color will make the white body
text disappear
Email header is in a dark background
Issue with text extraction from One Note with non-ASCII characters
Issue with text extraction from PDF with broken words with spaces
Issue with text extraction from PDF incorrect Hebrew texts from PDF file
Conversion from MS Word DOC to PDF could produce garbage character
Viewer hangs while rendering a certain PDF file with formulas
Conversion from MS Word DOC to PDF could print certain paragraph numbers
twice
Enhancement for support of HWP files 5.0.4 and above
Outlook Appointment files show as corrupted when viewing/exporting.
Candidate Word file attachments received corrupted from Outside-In
service
Selecting from both body and header of MSG document creates redaction
more than
Viewer failed to display content of a particular MS Excel document
properly
msg file converted with extra question mark like character
OutsideIn garbles Japanese and other multi-byte characters
Drawpage produces half size view for the tiff file
Exporting PDF file results in inverted text
Conversion to PDF skips some text and graphics elements
Crashes when viewing a particular MS Excel document
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Stefan Fleischmann
X-Ways Software Technology AG
Carl-Diem-Str. 32 32257 Bünde Germany |