Lumber

Inspiration

All of us are passionate about cyber security, as well as active at out schools IT help desk. There, we saw a need for a easy to use digital forensics tool. We had an recent incident where a tool like this would have been able to show exactly how a student's computer was compromised, what the program did, and how to inform their peers to protect themselves. We are driven by the passion of making digital forensics more accessible in order to help as many people as possible.

What it does

Lumber is a tool that uses various forensic methods to collect information about a computers recent history of launched executables and associated binaries. It then provides a sleek and accessible user interface to help show any suspicious activities.

How we built it

We spent a lot of time researching digital forensic techniques, finding where useful logs are kept on windows machines, and how to extract useful data from them. We wrote the backend using golang for its reliability in order to extract data from the logs, alongside a small c++ program to extract icons. We connected it to our frontend that was designed in Figma and written in svelte.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into challenges reverse engineering prefetch hash (an partially-encrypted and highly detailed windows log file) We had trouble with the frontend as well, as running svelte on the desktop proved to be sparsely supported.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of our newfound understanding of digital forensics, which is a field that we had not thoroughly explored prior to this hackathon. The final design of the desktop app turned out particularly good as well.

What we learned

We learned a lot about windows internals, digital forensics, and writing desktop applications. We hope to bring these insights to future hackathons, especially those in digital forensics.

What's next for Lumber

The team and Tim Timbers (Lumber's official mascot) plan to learn more about digital forensics, to add more criteria and methods of detection to our suite of tool. We hope to expand the scope of Lumber, fine tune the user experience, and chop down the tedium of reading log files, allowing digital forensics experts to flourish.

Lumber's HoyaHacks project number is #32.

Built With

• c++
• electron
• go
• javascript
• svelte
• tailwind-css
• windows-10