I thought it would be interesting to use Lenny Zeltser's excellent REMnux distribution to solve this puzzleposted by ForensicKB. I'll admit that I saw the solution before solving it, but since I don't have a copy of EnCase lying around, I wanted to use some free tools to accomplish the same thing.
Getting REMnux
Follow the instructions at the link above to get REMnux as a LiveCD or VMware-compatible virtual machine. Once you get it up and running (either just the console or the XFCE interface), we can get going...
Getting set up
Download the file into a new directory and unzip it.
remnux@remnux: ~$ mkdir Forensic Challenge6
remnux@remnux: ~$ cd ForensicChallenge6
remnux@remnux: ~/ForensicChallenge6$ wget http://www.lancemueller.com/blog/evidence/Suspicious_File.zip
remnux@remnux: ~/ForensicChallenge6$ unzip Suspicious_File.zip
Initial Steps
Just for fun, we can run "xorsearch" to see if we have an executable by looking for the string "This program cannot be run in DOS mode", a standard feature in Windows executables.
remnux@remnux: ~/ForensicChallenge6$ xorsearch Suspicious_File "This program"
Found XOR 6A position 0A4E: This program cannot be run in DOS mode....$
It's much later than we expected in the file, though (HINT: it's typically in the first 0x100 bytes.)
We'll use the "file" command along with the useful TrID to determine what type of we have.
remnux@remnux: ~/ForensicChallenge6$ file Suspicious_File
Suspicious_File: CDF V2 Document, corrupt: Cannot read summary info
remnux@remnux: ~/ForensicChallenge6$ trid Suspicious_File
TrID/32 - File Identifier v2.00/Linux - (C) 2003-06 By M.Pontello
Definitions found: 3887
Analyzing...
Collecting data from file: Suspicious_File
100.0% (.) Generic OLE2 / Multistream Compound File (8000/1)
Looks like an OLE2 Compound Binary File. I didn't want to write my own parser, so I started looking for a good command line one and found a good python scriptto do it for me.
remnux@remnux: ~/ForensicChallenge6$ wget http://www.decalage.info/files/OleFileIO_PL-0.21.zip
remnux@remnux: ~/ForensicChallenge6$ unzip OleFileIO_PL-0.21.zip
remnux@remnux: ~/ForensicChallenge6$ cd OleFileIO_PL-0.21/
remnux@remnux: ~/ForensicChallenge6/OleFileIO_PL-0.21$ python
Python 2.6.4 (r264:75706, Dec 7 2009, 18:45:15)
[GCC 4.4.1] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
A quick python interpreter session extracted the files from this compound file format.
>>> import OleFileIO_PL
>>> assert OleFileIO_PL.isOleFile('../Suspicious_File')
>>> ole = OleFileIO_PL.OleFileIO('../Suspicious_File')
>>> print ole.listdir()
[['Details'], ['File_0']]
>>> f = open('../Details','w')
>>> f.write(ole.openstream('Details').read())
>>> f.close()
>>> f = open('../File_0','w')
>>> f.write(ole.openstream('File_0').read())
>>> f.close()
>>> exit()
Now we have two files to analyze. We can use "xorsearch" again with the "-s" switch to perform the XOR on the executable file (File_0) and write the transformed file to disk.
remnux@remnux: ~/ForensicChallenge6/OleFileIO_PL-0.21$ cd ..
remnux@remnux: ~/ForensicChallenge6$ xorsearch -s File_0 "This program"Found XOR 6A position 004E: This program cannot be run in DOS mode....$
remnux@remnux: ~/ForensicChallenge6$ cat Details | perl -e 'while (<STDIN>) { foreach (split //) {print chr(ord ^ 0x6a)}}' > Details.XOR.6A
Now we have the two files, and we can perform the required MD5 hash calculations, or any other analysis desired (i.e. on the executable).
remnux@remnux: ~/ForensicChallenge6$ md5sum File_0,XOR.6A
8dc601710e3e68b8d78b5cd73fb28616 File_0.XOR.6A
remnux@remnux:~/ForensicChallenge6$ md5sum Details.XOR.6A
f93a7bb8e02a8a23f87dad22b9ecd578 Details.XOR.6A
Summary
I certainly learned a lot about REMnux, and got to write a bit of code in the process. Hopefully you learned a thing or two reading this as well.
More reading
If you love file specifications as much as I do, you'll love these documents.