Forensic Friday: Invoke-ForensicDD

[This is a continuation of my Forensic Friday series.  Every Friday I provide a short post on a forensic topic of interest or PowerForensics functionality (such as cmdlet descriptions, use cases, and lesser known features). Subscribe to Invoke-IR so you don’t miss a Forensic Friday!]

Happy Forensic Friday! This week I am taking us back to the basics with Invoke-ForensicDD. Pretty much every Forensicator/Incident Responder has used the Unix dd utility during their day, but I figured it’d be pretty cool to have a PowerShell implementation. This cmdlet provides read only access to the physical disk or logical volume, and returns the requested data as a byte array.

For a practical example of Invoke-ForensicDD, check out my Copying Locked Files with PowerForensics post. Not only does this show leveraging Invoke-ForensicDD to copy a locked file, the post also shows how PowerForensics builds on this functionality to provide more user friendly APIs.

Common Use
Like the unix dd utility, Invoke-ForensicDD has an -InFile parameter that should be used to point at the physical drive (\\.\PHYSICALDRIVE0) or logical volume (\\.\C:). An optional -OutFile parameter directs the output to a file instead of PowerShell’s output stream. The -Offset, -BlockSize, and -Count parameters provide instructions regarding what data to return (-Offset and -BlockSize must be divisible by the physical disk’s sector size, typically 512 bytes). Like Unix’s dd, -BlockSize represents the number of bytes to read at one time while -Count represents the number of BlockSize chunks to read. By default, -Offset has a value of 0 (the beginning of the file) and -BlockSize has a value of 512 (the smallest number of bytes that can be read at once).

This example reads 512 bytes from the beginning of the physical disk (\\.\PHYSICALDRIVE0) and passes the output to Format-Hex:

Invoke-ForensicDD -InFile \\.\PHYSICALDRIVE0 -Count 1 | Format-Hex

Read the first 512 bytes from the logical volume (\\.\C:) and write output to C:\evidence\VBR:

Invoke-ForensicDD -InFile \\.\C: -OutFile C:\evidence\VBR -Offset 0 -BlockSize 512 -Count 1