Forensic analysis of office open XML spreadsheets

dc.contributor.authorGodiah, David Odhiambo
dc.date.accessioned2017-11-20T09:06:54Z
dc.date.available2017-11-20T09:06:54Z
dc.date.issued2017
dc.descriptionThesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Information Systems Security (MSc.ISS) at Strathmore Universityen_US
dc.description.abstractDigital Forensics is the science of acquiring, preserving, analysing and presenting digital evidence from computers, digital devices and networks in a manner that is admissible in a court of law to support an investigation. Microsoft Office, LibreOffice, OpenOffice, NeoOffice and Google documents spreadsheets and presentations are widely used to store and circulate data and information especially within organisations. They are often rich in information deeply embedded in them that can be retrieved by examining metadata or deleted material still present in the files.OOXML is a standard developed by Microsoft and registered by ECMA (as ECMA-376), and approved by the ISO and IEC (as ISO/IEC 29500:2008) as an open standard for the development of Office documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Documents, spreadsheets and presentations created using this standard consist of zipped file containers, parts and relationships which upon extraction and analysis reveals forensically interesting information. Existing forensic tools have limitations as far as extracting and analysing OOXML spreadsheet metadata is concerned in that most of them can extract only limited and basic metadata.The objective of this research is to carry out forensic analysis of metadata in OOXML spreadsheets by studying limitations of existing forensic tools in extracting and analysing metadata in OOXML spreadsheets and designing and developing a Proof of Concept (PoC) implementation of a forensic tool that supports automated forensic analysis of OOXML spreadsheets with improved visualization, efficiency and advanced reporting functionality. This research adopts a methodology to review OOXML spreadsheet metadata extraction and analysis capabilities of existing forensic tools using sample spreadsheet datasets, carry out system analysis, design and PoC implementation of a forensic tool. In addition, the research carries out manual, functional, and security tests; quality assurance; and validation of the developed Proof of Concept implementation. The developed tool is able to extract and analyse relevant metadata from OOXML spreadsheets and present results in a forensic report.en_US
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/11071/5614
dc.language.isoenen_US
dc.publisherStrathmore Universityen_US
dc.subjectDigital Forensicsen_US
dc.subjectXMLen_US
dc.subjectOOXMLen_US
dc.subjectMetadataen_US
dc.subjectSpreadsheetsen_US
dc.titleForensic analysis of office open XML spreadsheetsen_US
dc.typeThesisen_US
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