I made multiple disk images and placed them on a hard drive and tried to run P2P Marshal on them, but it said no client installations found, yet I could see some P2P client directories with (FTK, EnCase, ProDiscover, iLook, etc.). Why doesn't it work?
P2P Marshal does not operate directly on image files. You need to use a physical copy of the disk or mount the disk image file so that it appears as a drive on the system (that is, it has its own drive letter). You can do this with EnCase's PDE or with a variety of third-party tools.
So, for example, if you mount evidence.e01 so that it is available as the Z: drive in Windows, then you would run P2P Marshal, create a new acquisition, and specify the Z: drive as the target to analyze.
When I attached P2P Marshal Field Edition (the USB thumb drive) to the suspect's computer, a Windows device manager pop-up appeared saying that drivers were being installed. What is being installed?
P2P Marshal Field Edition does not install any drivers on the target machine. Windows, however, may automatically install drivers to handle the USB thumb drive, as it would with any USB drive.
Also note: The data produced by P2P Marshal Field Edition should be stored on a separate evidence disk. If an investigator attaches a generic USB disk for data collection, then the changes to the target system will be similar to the following.
The following results are from a test using a blank P2P Marshal Field Edition thumb drive attached to a Windows Vista virtual machine test system:
The P2P Marshal Field Edition USB device uses the USB storage and generic disk storage drivers. On the Vista test system, it also uses the UMBus and WPD drivers, both of which are associated with portable disk devices. If these drivers are not currently active, they will be activated. If the drivers are not currently installed, they will be automatically installed. These drivers are all stock Windows drivers.
On the test system, both the usbstor and wpdfs drivers are automatically installed, creating USBSTOR.SYS and UMDF\WpdFs.dll drivers in C:\Windows\System32\drivers and PNF files in subdirectories of C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository. The files usbstor.PNF and wpdfs.PNF in C:\Windows\inf are modified. The installation also modifies files in C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\DataStore and C:\Windows\System32\wbem\Repository.
The process of installing drivers, activating drivers, and attaching new hardware writes to various Windows log files.
Each driver has a registry entry in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Class containing information about the driver. The drivers also create or modify the following registry keys:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\WUDF\Services\WpdFs
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Enum\UMB\UMB\1&841921d&0&WpdBusEnumRoot
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\WUDFRd
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup\PnpLockdownFiles
C:\Windows\system32\drivers\USBSTOR.SYS and C:\Windows\system32\DRIVERS\UMDF\WpdFs.dll are added to the list maintained in the registry key, HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\umbus\Enum.
Information about the USB device itself appears in multiple locations in the registry, partly because it is represented or listed with multiple subsystems. Registry keys or values containing USB device information are created in:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\EMDMgmt
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Portable Devices\Devices
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Class\{EEC5AD98-8080-425F-922A-
DABF3DE3F69A}\0000\DeviceData
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\DeviceClasses
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Enum\USB
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Enum\USBSTOR
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Enum\WpdBusEnumRoot\UMB
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\USBSTOR\Enum
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\WUDFRd\Enum
The following registry keys are modified to contain information about the USB device:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WBEM\WDM
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\disk\Enum
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\Ecache\Enum
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\partmgr\Enum
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\volsnap\Enum
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices
In the active user's registry, Explorer and SyncMgr create information about the USB device in the following keys:
HKEY_USERS\[SID]\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\MountPoints2\CPC\Volume
HKEY_USERS\[SID]_Classes\LocalSettings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\
SyncMgr\HandlerInstances
The following USB-related keys are created on our test system:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\usbflags\130701630100
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\usbstor\05AC12xx
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\usbstor\05AC13xx
In addition, the following keys are created on our test system during this process:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Security Center\Svc\Vol
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\UPnP Device Host\Description\{8DD4CA8A-
D5E2-49BE-BDA9-5E5A3B95442F}\UDNMappings\uuid:ea2e2afc-d1a2-4193-89cf-a9457aa5f489
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\UPnP Device Host\HTTP Server\VROOTS\/upnphost
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\StillImage
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\
Reporting\RebootWatch