Investigation and Automating Extraction of Thumbnails Produced by Image viewers

TL;DR

This paper presents an automated method for extracting image thumbnails from viewer databases, enhancing forensic investigations by reducing manual effort and improving retrieval efficiency of deleted images.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel automated approach for extracting viewer-generated thumbnails, addressing a gap in forensic tools for handling application-specific thumbnail databases.

Findings

Approach successfully extracts thumbnails from various image viewers.

Method reduces forensic investigation time significantly.

Robust across different storage structures and locations.

Abstract

Today, in digital forensics, images normally provide important information within an investigation. However, not all images may still be available within a forensic digital investigation as they were all deleted for example. Data carving can be used in this case to retrieve deleted images but the carving time is normally significant and these images can be moreover overwritten by other data. One of the solutions is to look at thumbnails of images that are no longer available. These thumbnails can often be found within databases created by either operating systems or image viewers. In literature, most research and practical focus on the extraction of thumbnails from databases created by the operating system. There is a little research working on the thumbnails created by the image reviewers as these thumbnails are application-driven in terms of pre-defined sizes, adjustments and storage location. Eventually, thumbnail databases from image viewers are significant forensic artefacts for investigators as these programs deal with large amounts of images. However, investigating these databases so far is still manual or semi-automatic task that leads to the huge amount of forensic time. Therefore, in this paper we propose a new approach of automating extraction of thumbnails produced by image viewers. We also test our approach with popular image viewers in different storage structures and locations to show its robustness.