Analysis of Time Information for Digital Investigation

In digital forensics, the creation time, last written time, and last accessed time of a file or folder are important factors that can indicate events that have affected a computer system. The form of the time information varies with the file system, and the information changes the features, depending on the user´s actions such as copy, transfer, or network transport of files. Specific changes in the time information may be of considerable help in analyzing the user´s actions in the computer system. This paper analyzes changes in the time information of files and folders for different operations of the FAT and NTFS file systems and attempts to reconstruct the user´s actions. Further, it demonstrates the use of time information for digital evidence analysis by presenting a case study.