A brief history of time stamps
Introduction
There are various methods of recording dates and times on computers and computing devices and as a forensic investigator it is useful to understand the main formats and also to have an understanding of why dates are stored in the way that they are. For those of us who like to delve a little deeper into file formats some familiarity with how these dates ‘look’ in a hex dump can help when reverse engineering a new file format.
During this short discourse I will be presenting screenshots taken using software developed by Sanderson Forensics – RevEnge. RevEnge supports the decoding and display of all of the date formats discussed.