FTimes For Linux

FTimes is a system baselining and evidence collection tool. FTimes's primary purpose is to gather and/or develop information about specified directories and files in a manner conducive to intrusion analysis.

FTimes is a lightweight tool in the sense that it doesn't need to be "installed" on a given system to work on that system, it is small enough to fit on a single floppy, and it provides only a command line interface.

Preserving records of all activity that occurs during a snapshot is important for intrusion analysis and evidence admissibility. For this reason, FTimes was designed to log four types of information: configuration settings, progress indicators, metrics, and errors. Output produced by FTimes is delimited text, and therefore, is easily assimilated by a wide variety of existing tools.

FTimes basically implements two general capabilities: file topography and string search. File topography is the process of mapping key attributes of directories and files on a given file system. String search is the process of digging through directories and files on a given file system while looking for a specific sequence of bytes. Respectively, these capabilities are referred to as map mode and dig mode.

FTimes supports two operating environments: workbench and client-server. In the workbench environment, the operator uses FTimes to do things such as examine evidence (e.g., a disk image or files from a compromised system), analyze snapshots for change, search for files that have specific attributes, verify file integrity, and so on. In the client-server environment, the focus shifts from what the operator can do locally to how the operator can efficiently monitor, manage, and aggregate snapshot data for many hosts. In the client-server environment, the primary goal is to move collected data from the host to a centralized system, known as an Integrity Server, in a secure and authenticated fashion. An Integrity Server is a hardened system that has been configured to handle FTimes GET, PING, and PUT HTTP/S requests.

The FTimes distribution contains a script called nph-ftimes.cgi that may be used in conjunction with a Web server to implement a public Integrity Server interface. Deeper topics such as the construction and internal mechanics of an Integrity Server are not addressed here.