Introduction

Blade® is a Windows-based, advanced professional forensic data recovery solution designed by Digital Detective.  It supports professional module plug-ins which give it advanced data recovery and analysis capabilities as well as Intelli-Carve® technology for accurate data recovery and validation.  Blade supports all of the major forensic image formats and is more than just a data recovery tool.  The professional modules have in-built validation and interpretation routines to assist with accurate data recovery.  Some of the standard profiles also have Intelli-Carve® validated routines (such as the JPEG recovery module).

The software has been designed for extremely fast/accurate forensic data recovery.  Not only is it highly effective in the pre-analysis stage of a forensic examination, it can be quickly configured to recover bespoke data formats.  It has specifically been written for the field of Digital Forensics.

What does it do?

Blade can:

  • Processes supported bit-stream for Browser artefacts
  • Recover deleted records and files
  • Native support for Expert Witness E01 image files
  • Native support for Advanced Forensic Format (AFF)
  • Native support for sector level processing of:
    • Physical devices (such as hard disks)
    • Logical devices (such as hard disk volumes or removable device)
  • Memory dumps
  • Export data in a format that can be imported into NetAnalysis for forensic review / analysis


Sources of Evidence

Blade can recover data from a number of different file system artefacts such as:



Supported Image File Formats

Blade supports a number of forensic image and output file formats.  The following table presents a summary of the supported file types.

  

Supported Forensic Image Formats
EnCase®  v1 - 8 Image File (EVF / Expert Witness Format)
*.e01
EnCase® v7 - 8 Image File (ex01)*.ex01
AccessData®  FTK Image Files
*.e01, *.001, *.s01

Advanced Forensic Format (AFF®)

*.aff;*.afd,*.afm
Logicube Forensic Dossier® E01*.e01
SMART/Expert Witness Image File
*.s01
X-Ways Forensics Image File
*.e01
VMWare Virtual Disk File
*.vmdk
Virtual Hard Disk File
*.vhd
Segmented Image Unix / Linux DD / Raw Image Files
*.000, *.001
Single Image  Unix / Linux DD/Raw Image Files
*.dd; *.img; *.ima; *.raw
Memory Dumps
*.dmp; *.dump; *.crash; *.mem; *.vmem; *.mdmp
Binary Dumps
*.bin; *.dat; *.unallocated; *.rec; *.data; *.binary
Micro Systemation Extraction File
*.xry

Table 1

Sector Level Access to Physical / Logical Devices

 Blade can search any binary file for supported recovery profiles and also supports direct sector level access to Physical and Logical devices.  This allows the user to employ hardware / software write blockers and to recover data directly from a disk or external media.


Blade uses an overlap process when reading a source to ensure that data is recovered on block boundaries.