Reconstructing Timelines: From NTFS Timestamps to File Histories

File history facilitates the creation of a timeline of attributed events, which is crucial in digital forensics. Timestamps play an important role for determining what happened to a file. Previous studies into leveraging timestamps to determine file history focused on identification of the last operation applied to a file. In contrast, in this paper, we determine all possible file histories given a file’s current NTFS timestamps. That is, we infer all possible sequences of file system operations which culminate in the file’s current NTFS timestamps. This results in a tree of timelines, with root node the current file state. Our method accounts for various forms of timestamp forgery. We provide an implementation of this method that depicts possible histories graphically.